According to this PR, the guys at ATI have decided to snag up the FireGL technology from SONICblue (The artists formerly known as S3). Thanks the archvile. Considering competition for NVidia has been running thin lately we all gotta hope right? Here's a bit:

``Our intent to acquire FGL Graphics represents a strategic investment for ATI, accelerating our entrance into the high-end workstation market by as much as two years through a combination of current OEM contracts, strong ISV partnerships and a dedicated team focused on delivering OpenGL-based technologies,''

ATI has released new drivers for their Radeon card. Win9x/ME is here and the Windows2000 drivers can be downloaded here. Thanks Nick.

ATI has released new Windows 2000 drivers for their Radeon card and Rage128/128 Pro cards. Thanks Steve.

Rage3D has version 7089 Win9x/ME drivers for the ATI Radeon card, which should fix general 2D driver problems and text display in the game NOLF.

The man with quite possibly the must useful Geocities site, tnaw_xtennis, has updated it with some more info on the Radeon LE hack, pointing out the HyperZ trick actually does not seem to work in OpenGL. Also, we missed this yesterday but he also has a brief analysis of the video core and memory speed of the GeForce3.

The man tnaw_xtennis is at it again with the RadeonLE stuff. He has come up with some pictures and more info on the ATI card which can be hax0red to work at full Radeon speed.

Well here it is, as mentioned this morning a hack for the Radeon LE cards has been put together to get the cards up and going at full Radeon speed offering a pretty significant speed boost.

Tnaw_xtennis, the man most famous for revealing some of the first accurate GeForce numbers, then later posting that neeto how-to in turning GeForce cards into Quadro cards is at it again. ATI has recently released a Radeon budget card, the ATI Radeon LE and word is the card can be hacked to perform just like the 'full version' cards. Here's an email he sent in along with this picture:

... The main difference between "Radeon" and "Radeon LE" is that the feature of ATI HyperZ, which claims can boost the effective memory bandwidth by 20%, on "Radeon" is disabled on "Radeon LE". [...] Athlon 650MHz, 128M Ram PC, the 3DMark2000 result at 1280x1024 32bit was reported to increase from 2070 to 2730 after the hack. Whether this hack is valid indeed is being verifying. If the result is positive, we shall report the detail shortly.

Microsoft has released some WHQL certified ATI Radeon drivers. You can grab the Win9x version here and the WinME version over here. Thanks Blues News.

There is a preview of the Mobility Radeon on AnandTech, ATI's answer to NVidia's GeForce2Go. It's not yet sure who has the faster performer for the notebook.

For the ATI Radeon owners among us, 3D Chipset has new "special" drivers for the cards, available for Win9x/ME, NT and Win2k. They mainly fix game related issues.

PC Insight has an interview with ATI, or more specifically, Rene Froeleke, who works for the technical marketing department at ATI Europe. Thanks Joe. The PC Insight guys ask them how they plan to keep up with NVidia, there's a question about the Gamecube, Radeon II, their HyperZ tech and a couple of other things.

With NVidia entering all the markets that ATI was succesful in and taking over the major market share, ATI is now moving into new markets such as integrated chip market. They have the right to build solutions for the Intel platform and Intel and ATI have also signed a broad cross-licensing agreement. Thanks Stomped.

I saw over at the site where the news updaters are always hard (and I'm not sure if that's a good thing), HardOCP, that 3D Chipset has new beta drivers for the ATI Radeon, available for Win9x and Windows 2000. There should be notable image quality improvements in games and using the TV-output.

3D Chipset has a new beta ATi Radeon driver, version 4.13.7062, for Win9x/ME. The fixes are mainly game related.

There is an interview with Dave Orton of ATI on Sharky Extreme. He is asked about ATI's current and future products.

Over at 3D Chipset are some new beta ATI Radeon drivers. They support DirectX8 but are reported as being slower then the 3063 release.

The GamersDepot guys managed to run into the CEO of ATI at Comdex, and asked him a couple of questions about his company and the products. Of course there are a lot of questions about NVidia, since they have taken ATI's lead in the desktop market. Mr K.Y. Ho is confident they won't be able to touch ATI in other markets (like mobile) though.

Looks like ATI is coming out with a Radeon card which is similar to the GeForce2 MX. This morning they have announced the Radeon VE which is a mainstream version of the Radeon videocard. Priced at $129 it comes with multi-monitor support, flat panel display and TV out support and has 32mb of DDR ram. Boards will ship in February of next year.

Over at 3D Chipset are new beta drivers for the ATI Radeon. It's a 14.5mb download.