Looking Back At ATI Technologies

In 2010, after 25 years, the ATI brand was phased out. Replaced by its owner AMD.

ATI was a survivor. They started off in Toronto. Far from Silicon Valley, but somehow thrived and started making graphics accelerators.

They transitioned from 2D to 3D, competed head to head with market leader Nvidia, struck a deal with Nintendo, and survived the graphics card wars.

What a journey! In this video, I want to take a look back at ATI.

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[NotJustBikes]

I used to work for ATI in the early 2000s, but I left just as the AMD acquisition was finalized.

I feel like this video was a bit negative, as ATI did hold the performance crown a few times against NVidia. Also, their drivers were terrible around the turn of the century, but after a big blow up with Microsoft (which is a whole story unto itself) they totally overhauled their software process and managed to make very stable and high performance drivers by around 2003.

I worked in the Radeon group, though I specialized in multimedia, including the TV Wonder and All-in-Wonder product lines. I'm pretty disappointed that these weren't mentioned, because these were absolute game-changers, especially before Windows had DirectPlay. The story of the end of All-in-Wonder (which I was actually involved in) is really interesting in itself, especially the story of the All-in-Wonder X1800. Not sure how much I could tell though. Am I still under NDA? 😂

Working in the Radeon department was intense. The competition between NVidia and ATI was extreme, and they were both developing at full-speed to optimize for a very small number of game-related metrics (mostly shader efficiency). I actually think their feud, focused almost exclusively on the relatively small niche of high-end gaming, was really detrimental to the PC industry, especially with respect to power consumption and battery life. For example, the ridiculous "Aero" interface of Windows Vista (and later versions) only existed because ATI had spent such an insane amount of money developing 3D shaders that they had to find a use for it outside of games (ATI basically wrote the spec for Aero and Microsoft put their name on it).

Anyway, there were a lot of incredible stories that came out of ATI even in the few short years I worked there. This video is a nice very high-level introduction, but wow, there's so much that happened there that most people will never know about. It really was an interesting company.

[voidtoast]

Another point worth mentioning is that a fragment of ATI lives on inside Qualcomm as their Adreno GPU's, ATI sold its mobile division to Qualcomm back in 2009. Its designers worked on gamecube and xbox 360 ATI GPU designs.

[ganlet]

ATI use to sell a variant of their cards with a TV tuner. I had an 8500 all-in-wonder and it was amazing.

[lohphat]

I was an early Netscape employee in 1994. ATI was literally next door on Middlefield Rd. In Mountain View, CA and we were growing so quickly we’d just take a PO next door to pickup new network hubs (back in the 10mb days) and then 100mb switches to meet the exponential demand the builds took on the infrastructure.

Those were the days.

[seamon]

A good historic video... albeit marked by a few notable omissions like ATI's massive comeback, taking the performance and efficiency crown, during 9000 series era.

[maybehuman]

It's hard to believe ATI has been gone for over a decade now. I built so many systems with those cards. I still have an ATI card in one of my PCs to this day working great. Makes me feel old. 😆

[andersjjensen]

This was largely correct, but I do remember three distinct times where ATI/AMD had the undisputed performance crown. The ATI 9700 PRO was the first of these that I owned.

[agenericaccount]

Man, just trying to imagine the Sliders universe where AMD successfully acquired Nvidia instead of ATI.

[HanSolo__]

I always admired the underdogs of computing technologies. I used to buy AMD chips, ATI graphics, LG monitors, and Toshiba laptops when they went south (today I took the SSD made by Kioxia).

[KevinLyda]

Ha! I worked as a contract sysadmin for a short spell in 1994/1995. I worked with that 3d graphics group. Kubota was going to lay them all off apparently and the team got wind of it. The manager was approached by ATI and told they wanted to build a team. He had one. They all resigned together.

Kubota would not let them have the premises that the team was in - it was rented and they had no other use for it. So my company was hired to set up their new office and then to move them back like six months later when Kubota relinquished the lease. They were a pretty intense group - very cool though. And they were excited to see their efforts more widely used.

[lp]

I had worked for ATI before. I was working at the front line of actually loading the bare circuit board and used the machine to print the paste on the board. Then loaded circuit chips to the machine for the robot arms to picked and placed the chips on specific areas on the bare boards.
Finally, The circuit boards got carried by the special conveyor tracks into the industrial oven. The finished video cards came out from the end of the oven for cooling and inspection.

[medallish]

ATI delivered some amazing cards throughout their existence, I've become a bit of a collector, though I started with the 9700/R300, that's the time I remember them really coming into the limelight as a true competitor, but they just went crazy with DirectX 9, the engineering that went into R500 was nuts, and honestly it was mostly due to games not pushing the tech hard enough that the R500 based cards didn't look better than they did.

I got an X1950 XTX in a very cheap computer at a flee market, at first I didn't think it was anything special, it was a generation I kinda skipped, I had a Geforce 6800 iirc. But the more I researched it the more it was clear to me, ATI put the very best into R500, and I'd love to see it dissected and pushed to it's limits in various ways. ATI clearly scooped up some incredible talent early on, it's a shame they weren't bigger before they got bought.

Anyway great video! I always enjoy getting a more personal perspective of some of these people.

[pfandahalf]

I bought the amazingly fast ATI Radeon 9700 Pro at the end of 2002 along with a copy of Unreal Tournament 2003 and I loved the experience. 2 years later I bought Half Life 2 and the 9700 Pro was still a beast. It played the game smoothly, maxed out with high frame rates. That was one of the greatest cards I have ever owned and it provided years of entertainment. I hope my current rtx 3060 ti is as useful as long as the 9700 Pro was because I love that card too.

[spladam]

Thanks Jon, I really can't get enough of your content, it's a great presentation of the material as well, that pic of that old ATI driver disc brought back some memories.

[StephenGillie]

This video doesn't even mention 3dfx, despite them being a larger player in the late 90s than Nvidia. 3dfx's Glide protocol was superior to Nvidia's OpenGL, and made games like Starsiege: Tribes run like butter. The 3dfx Voodoo3 was a game changer, being that company's first 2d AND 3d video card. (The Voodoo2 would sit next to a 2d card, and have a cable running the video out from the 2d into a video in on the Voodoo2.)

Also no mention of the ATI All-In-Wonder cards that combined great 2d and 3d acceleration with great video input, capture, and playback. All of ATI's cards included some level of video input, making it easy to record live TV in the era before Tivo became common. This made their cards fun to own - you might be watching TV next to your PC and think "how can I watch TV on my bigger monitor?" and you'd usually just have to plug in a couple cables and install the capture software.

[Protoking]

I'm so fortunate to find this video a mere day after it was uploaded. ATI was my favorite GPU company.. an underdog like AMD that somehow could occasionally manage to outperform the larger competitor its sort of fitting AMD bought them I just wish they could have kept their identity.

[mc-not_escher]

I started my Windows career on a Rage 3D, went to a Radeon X850 Pro (AGP x8), nowadays using an aging A6-5200 APU with Linux, funny how ATI always had my back no matter where I went in the computersphere hah.

[andrieskrugersdagneaux]

Asianometry was mentioned in the Dutch newspaper NRC yesterday.

[ApolloVIIIYouAreGoForTLI]

I remember it took me years to stop referring to them as ATI, Though this was compounded by the fact that I already mixed either company for the other... In my defence both were Three letter acronyms that stared with the letter 'A' & both used the colour red heavily in their branding.

[herbertholland]

I had the Original All in Wonder card. It had the Rage chip in it. Later versions would introduce the Radeon. It was the first card to combine both a 2d card and a 3d accelerator. It also had a TV tuner. I was using my PC as a DVR before DVR's were really a thing. It was one of my favorite cards ever.