At that place'due south plenty of graphics history and applied science to unpack here. When AMD purchased ATI, it didn't merely blot the visitor, but continued its reputation of beingness a graphics powerhouse for years to come up. Looking dorsum, you can see how AMD set itself up for this kind of success although for many years it didn't look so rosy.

Enthusiasts have seen some impressive products from their favorite chip makers, with AMD boasting top-performing CPUs and GPUs these days. With a wide array of products in history to showcase from the ATI and AMD graphics lineup, there are a select few that pushed the industry frontwards, impressed critics, and brought fiscal success to the visitor.

ATI VGA Wonder

The VGA Wonder Series helped put ATI on the map in the tardily 1980s. The VGA Wonder was an add-in menu for IBM PCs in the tardily '80s, featuring up to 512kb of video retentivity. It allowed display resolutions of 1024x768, and it featured automatic mode switching. Follow up models like the Wonder xvi and VGA Edge helped spread the ATI name, and somewhen, the VGA Wonder series were merged into and so replaced the Mach series of 2D accelerators. Graphics cards from this era even included an input port for a mouse.

ATI Rage 128

Image credit: Trio3D

The 3D Rage was billed as the company's first 3D accelerator, hoping to augment its loftier-quality 2d performance with more features. However, information technology missed the boat on Z-buffering, meaning it didn't quite work out every bit a stout competitor to rivals like the Nvidia NV1. Oops.

Fortunately, information technology was followed upwards by Rage Two and eventually Rage 128. The Rage 128 helped bring ATI to the mainstream, bringing performance on par with the Nvidia RIVA TNT and the Voodoo 2. The Rage 128 could do this past offering higher performance in the high-quality 32-chip color mode. Some rivals didn't even offer this mode!

The high-functioning enthusiast follow-up to the Rage 128 was the Rage Fury MAXX, which featured dual GPUs on a unmarried board, a design that ATI (and AMD) would lean on in the future. Expectations of the 64 MB Fury MAXX were sky-high. Unfortunately, the price and operating system support of the card limited its success.

ATI Radeon DDR

While ATI never managed to rule the benchmarks, its offerings were boilerplate performers with appealing prices. The Radeon DDR with its faster retentiveness, launched in Baronial 2000, showing how committed ATI was to the gamers graphics card market place.

With 64 MBs of memory and a loftier transistor count, the Radeon DDR implemented new features like environmental bump mapping, in addition to brand new DirectX 8 back up. Thanks to its 32-bit color performance and video-in and video-out back up, the Radeon DDR was an important highlight in ATI'south history.

ATI Radeon 9700

By 2002, ATI had built a decent reputation of offering graphics cards with plenty of features, even if they didn't always deliver the fastest 3D rendering. Things changed when ATI acquired ArtX, the folks who designed the graphics chips in the Nintendo 64 and Nintendo GameCube. Every bit a issue, the third-generation Radeon was a monster in simply well-nigh every way.

It was the kickoff carte to bring DirectX ix support, including shader, vertex, and pixel models 2.0. Furthermore, its flip-chip GPU parcel, allowed the card to run cooler and with higher clock speeds. It vanquish the acme-end Nvidia GeForce iv Ti 4600 in 3D operation, even when enabling demanding features like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. This generation of graphics cards wasn't just popular with deep-pocketed enthusiasts, as some mid-range Radeon 9500 models could be modded into a 9700 with some tweaks, furthering the value of ATI's products. This fleck had legs and managed high frame rates in games for several years.

Enter panel graphics: Flipper and Hollywood

It's important to bring up Flipper, the graphics engineering science behind the Nintendo GameCube. Designed by ArtX, which was afterward caused by ATI, the Flipper featured a few smart features that kept information technology efficient and cost-constructive. While the GameCube was cheaper and smaller than other consoles on the market, it boasted similar graphics quality and even some impressive furnishings including the pigment in Super Mario Sunshine and water in WaveRunner.

The GameCube and Flipper are a short note in comparison to the Nintendo Wii and its Hollywood GPU which was also designed by ATI effectually the time of its acquisition by AMD. While the technology was simply 50 pct faster than Flipper in the GameCube, the commercial success of the Wii was a huge win for AMD, as it turned out massive sales year after year.

With over 100 meg Wiis sold, AMD and ATI weren't just in the PC market place, but consoles besides which opened an entire new segment for the company. Graphics tech from AMD made it into the (equally successful) Wii U, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation four, Xbox Series 10/S, and PlayStation 5.

AMD Fusion APUs

After the ATI conquering, the next logical step was to combine their technology. Dubbed the Accelerated Processing Unit or APU, these chips could find success in markets beyond the traditional PC gamer, similar in depression-power embedded solutions and mobile chips or size conscious HTPCs and consoles.

The first AMD APUs, marketed as Fusion, arrived in 2022 as the Brazos platform that could all-time Intel's Atom CPUs and Nvidia's Ion GPUs with one bit. On the desktop side, the A8-serial APU showed that AMD could combine strong CPU performance with 3D rendering that could embarrass Intel integrated graphics. This meant AMD could provide a single, complete solution for many markets.

ATI Radeon Hard disk drive 4870

With the launch of the ATI Radeon Hard disk drive 4850 and 4870, the company impressed gamers with products that could keep upwards with Nvidia'due south flagship fries, merely at lower price-points. Fifty-fifty when Nvidia released its GTX 260 and GTX 280, the Radeon cards looked like the amend picks since they were more affordable, yet still in the aforementioned ballpark functioning-wise.

The Hd 4870 was also among the first cards to use GDDR5, chirapsia Nvidia to the punch past over a year. When ATI needed another bump up the benchmarks, the HD 4870 X2 arrived to put the screws to the contest.

ATI Radeon HD 5970

Perhaps ATI'south crowning achievement in the late 2000s was the Radeon HD 5970, a carte that dominated everything before (and afterwards its release thank you to some TSMC problems that slowed down Nvidia's 40 nm process). It packed an incredible corporeality of stream processors (3200!), a 725 MHz core clock, and dual ane GB banks of GDDR5.

Did we mention it was a dual-GPU layout? Another significant addition to this card was Eyefinity, ATI'due south on-dice brandish controllers that allowed for six simultaneous active displays. These cards were highly sought after with many enthusiasts disappointed with the limited supply.

AMD Radeon Hard disk 7970

The first PCI-Limited 3.0 Card, not to mention the start product using the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, was the flagship Radeon HD 7970. The GCN basic meant that the carte was a solid general-purpose graphics processing unit of measurement (GPGPU) and could perform well when it came to gaming, too. A quick refresh of the 7970 was the GHz Edition, which bumped the clock rate to 1,000 MHz and featured a boost role that bumped the clock to 1,050 MHz, a feature that nosotros still see on AMD cards today.

The GCN architecture used on this card laid the foundation for several meaning products down the road including the R9 290X, R9 Fury 10, Polaris-based cards like the RX 480, and the RX Vega serial.

Features similar variable refresh-rate Freesync debuted on the third generation GCN products, while the R9 Fury X and Vega models featured high-operation High Bandwidth Memory, which helped them entreatment to professional users rather than but gamers.

AMD Radeon RX 5700

The Radeon RX 5700 featured GDDR6 and used a 7nm manufacturing process. These 2 aspects helped improve operation and pricing. Best described as a mid-range product with fewer stream processors than the previous Vega cards, the RDNA/Navi-based 5700 XT was able to go on up with the previous-gen flagship card (Radeon VII) in gaming at a more affordable price point.

The RX 5700 was followed up by the RX 6800 and 6900 XT series, which helped put AMD back at the top of the gaming benchmark standings. The engineering behind these cards is also used in the latest generation of gaming consoles, the PlayStation v and Xbox Series S and 10 showing AMD has what it takes to deliver to gamers no matter the platform.

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35 years later: How many of these have you endemic?
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