Reader Interview: ATI's President & COO Dave Orton

Future Products (continued)

Is any of the Gamecube’s technology making it to the PC side of things and vice versa?

A. The design team that developed the Flipper graphics processor for the Gamecube is already hard at work designing a future generation of high performance ATI graphics chips. 

Are you actively, or looking at, entering the professional 3D graphics realm? (If so, when will we see a product?)

A.     ATI is aggressively targeting this market segment with upcoming products.  Stay tuned.

On the ALL-IN-WONDER card, rumor has it that it was originally going to release with a Digital Tuner on board, but that design issues forced that implementation to a lower priority. Are there current plans to include a Digital Tuner in the next generation of the ALL-IN-WONDER (R200 based)?

A. Digital TV reception is an area of research and development for ATI.  This functionality has not yet been designed into any shipping ALL-IN-WONDER® products.

How much faster (percentage wise) will the next generation of ATI's HYPER Z technology be?

A. The performance benefits that can be realized with HYPER Z™ are always significant, but they can vary depending on a range of factors including the specific application being run and the memory type & speed being used.  We have made significant improvements to HYPER Z™ that will find their way into future products, but it's not clear yet what the incremental performance improvement will be.  One thing that is clear, however, is that the faster a graphics chip can process data (pixels, texels, vertices, etc.), the more memory bandwidth it requires to operate at full speed.  The bandwidth existing memory technologies have been able to provide has not been sufficient to keep up, and this trend is expected to continue for at least the next couple of years.  This means the importance of technologies like HYPER Z™ will only continue to grow.

With the RADEON, will ATI plan to pursue both the business and gaming market for the long run? Will ATI plan to add "tweaks" for the hardcore gamer?

A. With the recent addition of MOBILITY RADEON™ and RADEON™ VE to the existing flavors of RADEON™ and ALL-IN-WONDER® RADEON™, there is now a RADEON™ product suitable for virtually everyone.  ATI will continue employing this strategy of providing a broad range of products with future graphics architectures.  With RADEON™, ATI has managed to win the support of a lot of hardcore gamers, and in the future we plan to focus more effort on meeting the needs of this important set of customers.

Will the next RADEON revision be a fully DX8 compliant part, or is that offering coming at a later date?

A. The currently available RADEON™, which has been shipping since last summer, already supports most key DirectX® 8.0 features including keyframe interpolation, vertex shaders, and pixel shaders with the latest drivers.  We are confident that ATI products will support any DirectX® 8.0 features that make it into released games.