LAS VEGAS - Markham, Ontario's ATI Technologies www.ati.com is at NAB with three new graphics cards for desktop PCs. The Radeon 9800 is designed for high-end graphics users, the 9600 series includes some high-end features at a price appealing to a broader market, and the 9200 is meant for mainstream users.
The 9800 features 256-bit memory interface and eight pixel pipelines to deliver realtime graphics, programmable shader engines, full floating point precision and support for the latest Microsoft, DirectX and OpenGL feature sets. The 9600 has four pixel pipelines and dual vertex engines, advanced anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.
In other ATI news, the company is collaborating with visual processing developer 3Dlabs to accelerate the development of the RenderMonkey shader development tool suite, which is available for free from both companies. RenderMonkey is a hardware-independent tool suite that advances shader programs in 3D applications. Under the terms of the agreement, ATI will continue to evolve the core RenderMonkey framework and both companies will develop plug-ins that support the shading languages of DirectX HLSL and OpenGL.