Anandtech, Hardware Central and Game PC have also put up their thoughs on the ATI Radeon videocard, which was announced last night.

Well guys, just made my way home from the ATI Radeon announcement. It looks like the rumors going around about ATI finally having a contender for the top of the market is a reality. You can check out the full press release here. Here's some of the juice:

- Most advanced graphics chip ever designed, featuring 30 million transistors, in an .18 micron technology, giving it a higher transistor count than CPUs such as the Pentium III and Athlon.
- First chip to support up to 128MB of double-data rate (DDR) memory at 200MHz
- First graphics chip to break through the Gigatexel barrier with an awesome 1.5 Gigatexel per second rendering engine.

A few notes I took while attending the launch party down here in New Orleans for you guys:

- OEM shipping in June, retail shipping this summer
- The 1.5 gigatexel number is achieved through "HyperZ" Z-buffer compression technology. The actual physical throughput is 1.2 gigatexels, but the compression squeezes a bit more performance equivalent to 1.5.
- 200mhz core speed.

Lastly, you guys wanna see some previews of the card right? Here are a few for you to look at. iXBT, HotHardware, SharkyExtreme , and FiringSquad. Oh yeah, and I actually got a hold of a benchmark of the card, on a 866mhz P3 box running at 1280x1024 in Quake3, it cranked out about 56fps. That is on drivers several months away from release. We can expect 'substantial' increaes in performance I've been told.

Well, we've seen info on the Voodoo5 from 3dfx and NV15 (kinda, here , here, here, and here) from NVidia, why not see what ATI has going? IXBT has a preview of the new Rage6 chipset which may finally be a contender with the top of the performance market.

- 25 million transistors
- 2 rendering pipelines with 3 texturing units each
- 200-400MHz core, 200mhz memory
- Pixel fillrate: 400-800 million pixels per second
- Texel fillrate:
    1 texel per 1 pixel: 400-800 million texels per second
    2 texels per 1 pixel: 800-1600 million texels per second
    3 texels per 1 pixel: 1200-2400 million texels per second
- 8-128MB local graphics memory
- 350-400MHz RAMDAC integrated into the graphics core

10:10update: You might wanna check out this SharkyExtreme article ont he chipset as well while you're at it. Thanks ilya.

For all you mobile gamers out there this SharkyExtreme report on the new ATI mobility 3D chipset should be of interest. The card comes out to be about as fast as a G400 but in a laptop, pretty good.

The FiringSquad has written up their impressions of the ATI tech that was on display at the Gamers Developers Conference.

IXBT Labs has a new article online doing some investigative reporting on the recently announced ATI Charisma 3D technology. Still no real verdict on the stuff just yet.

With the announcement yesterday by ATI of that neeto new technology that they are working on, SharkyExtreme has an article up already taking a look at the stuff.

Seems Microsoft won't be the only one doing some unveiling during the Game Developers Conference. ATI has a new chipset coming and will be releasing details of it during GDC, read the PR. No performance indications yet, but they their new thing will feature the Charisma Engine, which is their fancy name for the T&L GPU. Besides that, their Pixel Tapestry Architecture will feature the GigaTexel rendering engine. I'm looking forward to seeing what this actually means for the FPS this card will push.

The Pixel Tapestry(TM) Architecture features the world's first GigaTexel rendering engine, and includes support for deep multitexturing and new 3D effects with eye-popping photorealistic impact. It easily deals with complex elements such as metals, liquids and wood and their complex interaction with lighting and shadows.

Gamers Depot already has a first look up, explaining a couple of features.

Just when we got a hold of some more specs for the NV15, some specs for the next-gen ATI 3D integrated board have been leaked out. ReactorCritical has gotten a hold of some info. This is going to be built into motherboards and sounds pretty impressive:

Standart PC-133/100/66 SDRAM up to 1GB
First integrated North Bridge with hardware-accelerated geometry T&L
12,5 polygons per second
4 pixels/clock > 330M textured pixls per second
Revolutionary new parallel rendering architecture for state of the art pixell fill rates
Industry leading 8x Virtual AGP graphics performance and functionality
4MB to 64MB of main memory configurable for display memory

ATI has released some new drivers for their Rage 128/Rage 128 PRO powered videocards.

Computer Games Online has a preview of ATI's Rage Fury MAXX, performing some early benchmarks. It's currently already a little bit faster than the GeForce, so it should be even more once it ships in January.

The iXT Labs guys take a look at the Rage Fury MAXX card from ATI which looks to be a contender for the high end GeForce lovers.

ATI has released new drivers for their Rage128 cards about a week ago but nobody seemed to have caught it until Loony got wind yesterday.

The guys at the Firing Squad also took a look at ATI's Rage Fury MAXX, which also includes Q3 benchmarks where it's obvious that the card doesn't begin to shine until you run it in very high resolutions. Still, at 1280x960 and up, it beats the GeForce DDR.

A few of you guys may remember the Rage Fury MAXX announced by ATI a while back and probably blew it off as "oh, another ATI card" but it looks like the MAXX is a bit different. In fact, SharkyExtreme has a hands-on with the card showing it handily beating the GeForce256 in every benchmark (Yes, Quake3). A pet peeve of mine however comes up, no damn 640x480 benchmarks! argh! I gotta pick on Sharky a bit, check this out:

We opted to set Quake III Test to run in "High-Quality" mode when performing this round of benchmarks, as we suspect most gamers that purchase 600MHz+ PCs equipped with GeForce256 and MAXX cards will do this as well. (No one spends $2,000+ on a PC to play their games in 16-bit color at 640x480 folks).

On further inspection, I came across the MAXX/GeForce article on GamersDepot which ran the card in 16bit with interesting results. GD also ran the card on a Celeron @500mhz which makes the GeForce seem quite a bit better on slower systems. Well, the deal is you can get a GeForce on shelves right now, the new ATI MAXX card will be on shelves next month. I'll try to get one and add it to my benchmarks for you guys.

update: roj over on the Quake3 messageboard has an excellent summary for those of you wondering what is going on with this stuff.

Not sure which one of these will be faster. S3 is working on their mobile 3D accelerator card, and ATI has just released word on their Rage128 Mobility chipset. As long as I can get some respectable frames on the old laptop in Q3 and UT, who the hell cares who makes the 3D chip eh?

AnandTech has a ATI Rage Fury Pro review, seems it ain't all that fast after all. Basically TNT2 and V3 still beat it in most areas.