Looking Back At ATI Technologies

I thought the 8500 was a great card. Probably ATi's first really good card. I originally bought a 8500 64GB but returned and exchanged it for a GF3 ti200 (funny how the naming changed over the years), because the drivers sucked. 6 months later I got a 8500 128GB and it was great. It was the beginning of ATi competing hard and its great driver development lead directly into the 9000 series jugernaut! Had great TV-out which was important for me back in the day. That card lasted me forever and later lived on for so long as a media center GPU for old CRT video out.
 
The thing that people usually seem to forget is what a fluke the 9700 Pro was for ATi. It wouldn't have existed if ATi hadn't bought a small company called ArtX. Technology acquired through that acquisition is what lead to the 9700 Pro and its successors.
 
I had a H.I.S. Radeon 9600 XT and a Sapphire Radeon HD 6950. I was happy with the former but not the latter due to ATi's driver issues at the time.
 
My 9500 non-pro soft modded to 9700 is still my favourite card of all time. What a great deal that was!
 
funkydmunky said:
I thought the 8500 was a great card. Probably ATi's first really good card. I originally bought a 8500 64GB but returned and exchanged it for a GF3 ti200 (funny how the naming changed over the years), because the drivers sucked. 6 months later I got a 8500 128GB and it was great. It was the beginning of ATi competing hard and its great driver development lead directly into the 9000 series jugernaut! Had great TV-out which was important for me back in the day. That card lasted me forever and later lived on for so long as a media center GPU for old CRT video out.
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I had a Radeon 7500 and then got the 9700 Pro.
 
very cool building! I guess now this building has an AMD logo slapped on it?
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Also I like how he show a pic of a Kubota tractor and is like, yeah that same Kubota lol!
 
I liked having drivers for the Mach64 in OS/2, back when windows was a bit dicey.

Lord that was a time. Running something not mainstream, but trying to get working drivers. This one, something from Orchid which I believe was based upon an S3, and maybe even a Number9 board? My memory fails me.
 
^oh yeah! The vestibule part where the logo is must be where the head honcho spends his days, I reckon.
 
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scoundrel said:
I had a 9800 pro paired with an Athlon XP 2100+, 1GB DDR400 and (much missed) Abit NF7-S 2.0. Oh boy! MOHAA was the game to play indeed. That card lasted me 7 years of intense, daily gaming.
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Thats pretty close to what my system at the time was same 9800 pro and an Abit NF7-S, AlthonXP 2500+M and 1.5 GB DDR 400.
 
horse said:
I guess now this building has an AMD logo slapped on it?
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Tell you what is funny, even in 2019 when HardOCP ended, samples that came from Markam, still said "ATI" on the return address label for FedEX/UPS. Guess someone never changed it on the account. I pointed it out to people at AMD for years. Maybe it is changed now, dunno.
 
ATI was my go to cards for many years back in the day.
Had a bunch of All In Wonder Cards over the years that I used for video capture.
I think the last ATI card I had was the Gecube X1950Pro AGP, I can't recall if AMD had acquired ATI at that time.

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Starfalcon said:
Thats pretty close to what my system at the time was same 9800 pro and an Abit NF7-S, AlthonXP 2500+M and 1.5 GB DDR 400.
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That board was a clocking beast but dayym that north bridge was blistering hot. Finally found a miniature heat pipe cooler for mine a year or so after touching it the first time.
 
learners permit said:
That board was a clocking beast but dayym that north bridge was blistering hot. Finally found a miniature heat pipe cooler for mine a year or so after touching it the first time.
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I had a (noisy) fan on mine too. There was no point for getting that expensive mobo without overclocking, so I kept the Athlon running at FSB 400 MHz, 1:1 with the DDR400 memory and a fan blowing sideways into the open case.
The 9800 Pro was one of the best cards I've ever had, I miss ATi a lot. AMD destroyed their drivers with the R series.
 
Zepher said:
I think the last ATI card I had was the Gecube X1950Pro AGP, I can't recall if AMD had acquired ATI at that time.
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That was right around the same time as the acquisition. Looking up release dates, the x1950 Pro came out Oct 17, 2006 and the AMD acquisition of ATI finalized on Oct 25, 2006.
 
learners permit said:
That board was a clocking beast but dayym that north bridge was blistering hot. Finally found a miniature heat pipe cooler for mine a year or so after touching it the first time.
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Yeah I ended up replacing the small heatsink and fan combo with a big blue Tt passive chipset cooler. With my Alpha PAL 8045 blasting tons of air out with a high speed delta on it, the massive airflow blowing through it kept my chipset nice and cool.
 
Anyone remember when ati.com was actually a place called Artificial Turd Industries? 🙃
 
Ahh... ATI Rage IIc... The card that deaccelerated my childhood games and ruined my gaming experience. There was not a single game that worked flawlessly. Though, at that time video cards aged like milk but still.
 
sphinx99 said:
My 9700 pro remains my favorite graphics adapter of all time.
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This. I can still remember how much I was in awe of the visual quality that the card’s FP16 pipeline enabled on tech demos. Oh my… and it got performance to boot, nothing quite like it since.
Interestingly, I was hoping that the RTX cards from nVidia would get me just as excited with the outlook for global illumination in real time, but I never got the same warm fuzzy feeling again like with the 9700 Pro.
 
CoreStoffer said:
This. I can still remember how much I was in awe of the visual quality that the card’s FP16 pipeline enabled on tech demos. Oh my… and it got performance to boot, nothing quite like it since.
Interestingly, I was hoping that the RTX cards from nVidia would get me just as excited with the outlook for global illumination in real time, but I never got the same warm fuzzy feeling again like with the 9700 Pro.
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I have bought quite a few graphics cards between the voodoo1 and the 9700pro, may have bought a few after. For the life of me can't remember which ones, though.
 
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