I remember when in 1997 at ComTech we were anxiously watching Quake with its fantastic graphics played at Diamond Multimedia's expo stand. There was the flaunting caption 'DiamondMonster3D' proudly waving above the three or four monitors. The sight was so enchanting and touching that I decided I would definitely buy a 3D accelerator as the manager advised me in order to get such a beauty. No sooner had a week passed than I was walking around the radio market in Moscow hunting out for the long-awaited rig... But that time I was unable to get it because it hadn't been released by then. Anyway the vendors were unanimously claiming the future was already there and it was no use buying some monsters while IT was already in.
The 'it' was indeed impressive that time. The card was then called ATI Rage Pro, had 8 MB onboard and along with that supported 3D graphics acceleration. The price was equally as impressive, around $300. That time I was so obsessed with it that easily forked out for it without compunction. In about one and a half hour my joy turned into disappointment, because that time was enough to get home and try the game on my computer. ATI Rage Pro wouldn't run with Quake that time! It would run with almost no rigs except for a small DOS utility bearing the dear caption 'Test3D'. That's how my acquaintance with 3D gaming graphics and ATI started.
Years passed. It's sad to see the prices for top-end 3D accelerators almost haven't changed for the past five years, and if you want to get a best model you'll anyway fork out $300-$400. For these years, ATI has released chips and video cards of numerous makes, which helped ATi produce hold second to fourth positions. The cause of that was poor marketing, worthless programming team and the vicious practice of delaying chips shipments after the announce. The release of Rage 128 with the awful drivers seriously undermined the reputation of that fairly good chip and created a biased opinion of the company's products. The hasty release of first Radeon-based cards with raw drivers repeated the old bad mistake. The times were hard, and every month the lab was facing a market failure.
In no earlier than a year did ATI succeed in fixing the driver flaws, but the winning time for Radeon elapsed. And when the competition was shaping up to look more like NVidia's victory over the other contenders, ATi made a 'move of the knight' and released the new R200 chip. In fact, that was the last straw for ATI to take its niche and it did make use of it to her own advantage. Although released six months later than NV20(GeForce3), the R200-based cards (Radeon 8500) had several novelties appealing to potential buyers and looked like a breakthrough as compared with NVidia products. The N-patch technology dubbed by ATI with the nice term "TrueForm" and the adaptive antialiasing have not yet found adequate response from nVidia to date, and support for these functions is expected only in the new NV30 chip.
review at Digital Daily
