ATI today announced their new family of Radeon cards, based on newer technology. The one we as gamers should all look at is the Radeon 8500. Here's what that puppy will have

The Ultimate Gaming Graphics Card The RADEON 8500 is powered by the most advanced graphics technology in the world, and features 64MB of DDR (double data rate) memory, digital flat panel (DVI) support as well as dual monitor and video output, and DVD (digital versatile disc) video playback. The first gaming card with complete hardware support for DirectX 8.1, the RADEON 8500 will be available in late September and has an MSRP of (US) $399.

There's some previews on Gamespot, AnandTech and Inside Mac Games. Besides the Radeon 8500 there's also a 7500 ("It delivers up to a 60 percent improvement in performance compared to the previous generation of RADEON high-performance processors") and the FireGL 8800 card. Even The Carmack has stated that this next gen Radeon processor has the potential to be great. Also Voodoo Extreme has a quote from Tim Sweeney. Lets hope ATI does a good job on the drivers and offer some real competition to the GeForce 3. Because we all love price wars, right?

Over at System Logic are several pics and specifications from the ATI Radeon 2 card. Hopefully will be good enough to compete with the GeForce 3.

ATI preps A3 alternative to Nvidia's nForce is a story on The Register, speculating about a possibility that ATI might come out with a chipset similar to the nForce. It might support the Pentium3 and the Athlon, but more likely it will also have a Pentium 4 version since ATI has a license. We should see more of this in the fourth quarter of this year.

Sharky Extreme has posted an interview with ATI this afternoon. President Dave Orton answers reader questions about such things as their Gamecube graphics chipset, 3rd party sales of their products, drivers, new technologies and more.

RivaStation has an article looking at another new technology that ATI has been working on for their video cards. Smartshader. It actually dims your monitor when there is too much sun!

The Register has a story about the continued specification leaks of the ATI Radeon 2. It will have a 350mhz core, 6 rendering pipelines, a programmable vertex shader, and based on 0.15 micron fabrication. Of course it will also support ATI's buzzword HydraVision multi-display technology and Truform rendering technology.

3dXtreme has posted new Radeon drivers for Win9x/ME and Win2k users. No word on fixes.

I see at Stomped that 3D Extreme has some new leaked drivers for the ATI Radeon owners. These are for Win9x/ME.

I see on Stomped that there are some new ATI Radeon beta drivers for Win9x/ME and Win2k. The Win9x/ME driver is 8.16mb, the Win2k is 6.79mb.

Looks like ATI is taking drastic measures to compete with NVidia as they are licensing their chips to third party card makers according to The Register (thanks the archvile). ATI will continue to sell cards under their own brand, and the other manufacturers are only allowed to sell their cards to system integrators and reseller channels, with ATI selling their cards in the retail section and to OEMs like Apple.

Success depends on minimising competition between ATI and its third-party board makers. Segmenting the market the way ATI has will help, but what's to stop major OEMs buying the cheapest possible boards from the third-parties and cutting ATI out of the loop? ATI will still make money on the deal, through the chips the board makers will buy, but not as much as it would dealing with the OEM directly. With sufficient numbers of board makers, ATI will make up the loss, and presumably it's confident it can do so.

The AnandTech guys have a bit more information and images on the new ATI Truform stuff that was announced this morning. You'll see the stuff in the upcoming ATI Radeon2 cards whenever those come out. Thanks Lord BEEF and turd ferguson

It looks like word has snuck out a little early about the new ATI videocard chipset announcement. GamersDepot got the scoop yesterday about the ATI Radeon2 which will be announced this coming Tuesday following the holiday weekend. What's da dilly?

ATI will be announcing on Tuesday a new technology to be incorporated into their upcoming Radeon 2 graphics chip called TRUFORM. This new technology will let game developers make in-game models look more real than ever before. [...] the technology works by letting the hardware transform an image that is flat into a rounded image resulting in things like more realistic facial modeling. TRUFORM is said to use Direct X 8.0 functions

TweakFiles has a new version of Raid-On Tweaker, a tweaker utility for the ATI Radeon cards. There are several bug fixes and new features such as Direct3D and Directdraw sections being added to the tweaking.

Rage3D has a new beta Radeon display driver for Windows 2000 users and Windows 98 users up for download. Direct3D Anti Aliasing is set to Application Preference by default now and for the Win98 users Quake2 should be faster (kinda late, heh). Saw that at Stomped.

AnandTech has a new reader interview, with questions from readers being answered by ATI President Dave Orton. Reader questions include the status of good Windows 2000 drivers, why the All-in-Wonder Radeon still isn't available in Europe, NVidia & 3dfx, and of course future products.

ATI has released a new Radeon Beta display driver for Windows 98 and WinME users. The 8.19mb driver includes support for the 64mb DDR Radeon, the 32mb DDR version, the 32mb SDR version, the Radeon VE and the All-in-Wonder Radeon.

The Inquirer has posted a brief update on the Radeon 2 from ATI. Apparently this card is not far off at all and should be a direct threat to the GeForce3. More here.

The FiringSquad has posted a feature looking at the history of ATI and the evolution of their products in the past few years.

There's a new version of the Radeon tweaking program RadeonTweaker on TweakFiles.com. This new profile has a Black & White profile, a profile for Final Fantasy 8 and fixes some bugs from the previous version.

x[visine] let us know about the new ATI Radeon special purpose drivers that are up at the ATI website. They are for Win9x/ME.