Interview with ATI

Q. Please introduce yourself and your position at ATI?
A. My name is Ed Knight and I am a Technical Marketing Manager for ATI Technologies, Europe.

Q. How long have you worked for ATI?
A. I joined ATI on November 2nd, 1999.

Q. Are you satisfied with acceptance of your Radeon cards by the market?
A. We're very pleased with how the Radeon cards have been accepted in the marketplace since the launch. The launch itself was a great success, and we continue to get positive reviews of all the Radeon-based cards from the online and print press. In particular, all the Radeon-based cards received praise for unmatched display and TV out quality, full hardware DVD acceleration, innovative features like Hyper-ZTM to boost memory bandwidth and support for a host of advanced texture mapping, 3D rendering and animation features like Environment-Mapped Bump Mapping, 3D Textures, priority buffer-based accn of shadows, 4-matrix vertex skinning and key frame interpolation.

The introduction of the Radeon 64MB VIVO marked ATI's successful entry into the high-end games market. The Radeon VE, the most highly integrated chip announced by us so far, has allowed us to bring the most important 3D rendering and multimedia functions of the Radeon with the addition of TV out, dual display and digital flat panel support onto a card priced for the mass market, and the response to that product has been extremely encouraging.

Q. How big is your share in 3d market worldwide and in Europe?
A. Please refer to the latest Mercury Research report for an independent analysis of the worldwide graphics market.

Q. Your share in high end cards like the Radeon 64 DDR?
A. Again, I would refer you to an independent market research report for such figures, such as the Mercury Research report.

Q. How many cards do you produce monthly?
A. We report our sales out numbers to independent market research organisations like Mercury Research, and I would suggest you consult their reports for such information.

Q. Why is Europe always late with launching and especially availability of cards?
A. With certain products, especially multimedia products, we have required time to complete localisation of the product before being able to ship in Europe. However, ATI is looking at ways to bring products to market in Europe faster so things might change in the future.

Q. Explain to us your special relations with Intel?
A. ATI has had a close cooperation with Intel for many years. Implementing state-of-the-art 3D graphics technology often demands advancements in the PC system architecture itself, and ATI continues to work closely with all the key companies in the PC industry who are involved in shaping the future of the PC architecture. AGP 8X, the newest AGP interface announced by Intel in August last year, will be a key element of ATI's strategy to develop 3D products that deliver industry-leading performance in the future.

In January this year Intel and ATI announced the signing of a broad cross-licensing agreement. The agreement grants each company rights to certain patents owned by the other which will help ATI and Intel to incorporate new features and technologies into their products. ATI negotiated the right to build integrated chipsets for Intel microprocessor platforms.

Q. You also have a licence for AMD's Hypertransport technology, are you going to use it for your R200 Maxx cards?
A. ATI fully endorses AMD's HyperTransportTM technology and will support its industry standardization through its plans to incorporate it into future products. We haven't even announced plans for a dual asic card based on our next generation chip, so I can't comment on such a product at this point.

Q. Tell us what you think about Tile based rendering?
A. Tile based rendering is one approach to reducing overdraw in 3D rendering and the performance overheads associated with that. In the Radeon, ATI's approach was to implement Hyper-Z™ to tackle this problem and you can expect to see further enhancements being implemented in our future generations of chips.

Q. What do you think about competition?
A. I'm not sure if you mean competition in general, or ATI's competition in the market today. In general, I think it is healthy to have competitors in your market: monopolies in any market tend to get greedy and that leads to dissatisfied customers. ATI has strong competition. Our competitors continue to release innovative new technologies. This drives and motivates the whole ATI workforce to continually innovate and execute on our key strategies. So I honestly think competition is a good thing and I would rather have some competition than none at all.

Q. Are we going to see a unified driver architecture in future from ATI?
A. I'm not sure if ATI will ever move to a unified driver model, meaning a single set of binaries that supports the entire current product line for a given operating system. Our current driver model, with separate binaries for different product families like Rage128 and Radeon, has the advantage that product refreshes for currently shipping products are easier and quicker to implement. If an OEM needs to update a driver, separate binaries mean they can update and re-qualify only the product they need to update. With unified drivers, all board configurations have to be requalified. At the source code level, ATI shares a tremendous amount of code between drivers for different chips and operating systems. This facilitates code maintenance and means improvements to drivers are rolled out for the maximum possible range of products and operating systems in one go.

Q. Does the ArtX team have any influence on the R200 chip?
A. The team that designed the graphics chip for the Nintendo Gamecube are working on designing a future generation of ATI geometry engine-based graphics chip. As far as I know, they weren't involved in the design of the R200.

Q. Are we going to see "on die" memory in future chips from ATI?
A. I'm not aware of any plans to integrate memory onto a graphics die for an ATI chip in the near future. ATI has been offering integrated memory in the multi-die-BGA-packaged Mobility chips for some time. However, combining memory and logic technologies on a single die whilst maintaining good performance and yields is more difficult, so I doubt we'll see this in the short term.

Q. We saw some Power color cards based on your chips which are not so common to see. Can you tell us a little about your relations with 3rd party manufacturers?
A. I'm not aware of ATI having done business with a company called Power Color. I'm not too au-fait with the details, but I've heard that some manufacturers may be currently offering graphics cards with ATI chips from non-ATI sources.

Q. What are the Radeon LE and Radeon SE cards?
A. RADEON LE is an entry level member of the RADEON family that is being offered specifically for the Chinese market by Althon Micro and AMI Technologies Corp, ATI strategic partners. Providing good performance at an aggressive price point, the RADEON LE benchmarks very well against the competition in this segment. For product information and availability, please contact:

Althon Micro:
Canada: Tel. 905-513-1221
US: Tel. 909-594-3128

ATI has not announced a product called Radeon SE, and currently has no plans to release a product with that name.

Q. We all know that ArtX's speciality is integration. Since you own them now, tell us about your plans for the integrated arena?
A. ATI will be aggressively entering this important market with its next integrated product, which we have not yet announced.

Q. Can we get any hints about date of announcing your next generation technology and samples?
A. An announcement about technology incorporated in our next generation chip will follow very soon: stay tuned!

Q. Your next generation product should be available in September?
A. Our next generation product will be in production by the end of summer.

Q. What was the main cause of postponing your next generation product R200 from spring to summer 2001?
A. We never announced a schedule for our next generation chip. In fact, work on that product is progressing excellently and we are on target to our schedule to launch the product by the end of summer.

Q. When can we expect mobile Radeon in laptops?
A. We've been working closely with all our major OEM partners on Mobility Radeon Notebook designs. Watch out for design win announcements in the coming months.

Q. We believe that you are soon to be involved in 3D professional rendering. Tell us about that?
A. ATI has the professional graphics market firmly in mind as a target market for future products. ATI's acquisition of FireGL Graphics brought us a wealth of experience and highly qualified engineers from a recognised leader in the workstation market and an established workstation product range. Many of the leading workstation manufacturers have platforms based on FireGL products. We are very excited about our future prospects in that market.

Q. What do you think about motion blur effect?
A. Ok, here's my opinion (not ATI's position) on this. In my view, the most compelling games (game play and style aside) will be the ones which provide a visual environment which is closest to that which we're used to seeing with our own eyes in the real world.

The implementations of motion blur (and extensive lens flaring) that I have seen in games remind me more of what you would see with a video camera or the like, but less so what you really see with the eye. If you have a high frame rate, your eye will do a motion blur effect on the game action for free! So I don't see this feature as playing a particularly important role in enhancing the realism of the visual environments in games, but many games players might disagree and their opinion counts more than mine!

Q. Can you enable motion blur in driver?
A. Yes, we have demonstrated motion blur in operation in one of our Radeon demos.

Q. Three-matrix games should be announced very soon - your comments?
A. The Radeon supports 4-matrix vertex skinning and we're delighted by the positive response to, and support of, that feature by the games developers. Hardware skinning allows more extensive and lifelike animation in games and that becomes desirable as the characters in games become more detailed and lifelike thanks to the higher polygon counts allowed by a geometry engine like the Radeon's Charisma™ Engine. Watch out for new titles supporting this feature being released over the coming months.

Q. Are we finally going to see a Remote controller in your future AIW card?
A. We're considering that as an option for our future AIW products.

Q. Do you think that Xbox and Gamecube are going to affect PC gaming market?
A. I think that the next generation games consoles, (let's not forget the Nintendo Game Cube incorporating ATI graphics technology J ) will have an important and positive impact on the PC gaming market.

These consoles will open up a large market for games developers to address with new games titles. The consoles have high performance geometry engine-based graphics and the games will make extensive use of multi-texturing, highly detailed models and advanced rendering and animation features. This will give games developers a compelling reason to develop games with advanced graphics engines, and we expect PC versions of comparable quality to be released, so that the selection and quality of PC games titles can be expected to be dramatically improved.

Q. Tell us about availability and pricing of your cards? Europe and Worldwide
A. All of the products that we have announced so far are available in the geographic regions where they have been announced.

Recommended End-User Prices for ATI products (includes 16% VAT) - Feb 1 2001

RADEON 64MB DDR VIVO -183MHZ 599DM
RADEON 32MB DDR 469DM
RADEON 32MB SDR TV-Out AGP 339DM
RADEON 32MB SDR TV-Out PCI 359DM
RADEON VE 32MB DDR DUAL DISPLAY 269DM
ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 32MB DDR AGP 799DM
RAGE FURY PRO VIVO 289DM
ALL-IN-WONDER 128 PRO 32MB AGP 499DM
TV WONDER 179DM
RADEON MAC EDITION 32MB DDR TVOUT AGP 559DM
RADEON MAC EDITION 32MB DDR TVOUT PCI 559DM
XCLAIM VR 128 479DM

Q. What is the most acceptable frame rate in 3D games for you?
A. I'm not an avid game player, but I find an acceptable frame rate depends on the type of game being played. Many games are OK at 30/40 frames/sec, but really high speed action games often benefit from frame rates up to 60 frames/sec. Anything over that is purely for benchmarkers in my opinion!

Q. Do you play 3D games and if do what is your favourite one?
A. I don't play games often, but when I do I go for flight/racing simulators like Microsoft's Flight simulator and Electronic Art's Need for Speed Porsche. I know that there are plenty of other great titles in that genre, but I haven't had a chance to try them out so far.

Q. Anything you want to add?
A. We are currently entering a fascinating phase in the development of computer graphics. ATI has a lot of exciting announcements to make this year, starting very soon, so stay tuned to your web browsers for the latest news!

Q. Thank you for your time
A. You're welcome! µ