ATI's goal: 'stalwart graphics solutions' for the Mac
January 16, 2004 - 09:36 PST   By Dennis Sellers - When ATI Technologies introduced the Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition at Macworld San Francisco 2004, part of the company's plan was to show that it provides "stalwart graphics solutions for the Mac," Stan Ossias, ATI senior product manager, told MacMinute. The Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition, designed exclusively for use with the high-end Power Mac G5, has 256MB of DDR memory, with a 680MHz data rate and a core engine speed of 380 MHZ. The new graphics card -- due by the end of the month at a manufacturers suggested retail price of US$469 -- is supported by drivers included within Mac OS X.

"It's a response, in a way, to the 128MB Radeon 9800 that plugs into a Power Mac G4 or G5," Ossias said. "It enables a direct connection with Apple branded displays through dual output ADC and DVI connectors, something users have wanted."

The extra memory and increased speed provide "reasonably better performance," he added. ATI's 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro is also available as a build-to-order option in the Power Mac G5 (the Radeon 9600 Pro comes included in the high-end version of the machine). Though ATI doesn't expect many current 9800 users to shell out the money for the new card, power users into animation, CAD and high-end gaming who want every ounce of enhanced performance they can get may upgrade, Ossias said. The recently released Halo is a great example of the kind of graphics power the 9800 line offers, he stated.

"The 9800 Pro for the Mac offers the fastest graphics card technology on any platform," Ossias said. "With it, there's no tradeoff between the appearance of onscreen graphics and performance."

The 9800 Pro has eight pixel pipelines and supports the latest OpenGL feature sets to enhance lighting, textures and effects. It sports 128-bit floating-point color precision and programmable shaders thanks to ATI's SmartShader 2.1 technology. Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control, while Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass.

The 9800 Pro's SmoothVision technology offers full-scene anti-aliasing, the ability to process over 18 billion anti-aliasing samples per second, support for up to 6x mode with programmable sample patterns, advanced anisotropic filtering, support for up to 16 trilinear filtered text samples per pixel and an adaptive algorithm. If all this is unfathomable techno-speak to you, these features enable hyper-realistic imagery to be displayed with billions of color variations, according to Ossias.

"We also want to let people know that graphics cards are upgradeable in the Power Mac line," Ossias said. "And we want to encourage Mac users to contact Apple and ask for ATI cards on new machines. Apple listens. We do a lot of work on Mac-only features and work closely with Apple, so we feel our graphics cards are perfect complements to the company's systems. Also, we don't feel it's enough to just support Mac development; we believe we have to innovate on the platform."

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