Mac vs PC. Apple vs Samsung. Intel vs AMD. There's no shortage of monumental rivalries in the tech industry. But the royal rumble between ATI and Nvidia for dominance of 3D graphics is one of the roughest yet the healthiest of the lot.
The contest is really AMD vs Nvidia. After all, AMD snapped up Canadian graphics outfit ATI back in 2006.
The histories of ATI and Nvidia have been very closely intertwined. Both started out as specialists in PC graphics and have since branched out into non-PC platforms such as games consoles & mobile devices
However ATI's acquisition by AMD seems to have set it on a very different path for the future from Nvidia.
ATI vs Nvidia: RIVA and Rage
The early days of graphics on the PC saw 3D cards like Nvidia's RIVA 128 and TNT(RIVA is an acronym for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator ) take on ATI's Rage and Rage 128. But it was Nvidia who presaged the modern GPU or Graphics Processing Unit with the mighty GeForce 256 in 1999. It was the first graphics chip with hardware transform and lighting
capabilities. ATI responded in 2000 with the Radeon graphics card. Ever since,successive generations of GeForce and Radeon GPUs have been leapfrogging each other in the race for graphics supremacy.
AMD vs Nvidia
Radeon rethink
At least, there wasn't one until ATI released the underperforming Radeon 2900XT . Like Nvidia's calamitous GeForce FX series, the 2900 arrived late, ran hot, underperformed and couldn't match its opposition, the GeForce 8800 Ultra
But unlike the GeForce FX, it lead to a strategic rethink. AMD decided that in the future ATI would no longer chase ultimate performance with its top GPU. Instead it would aim for maximum bang for buck and introduce dual-GPU boards to cater for enthusiasts demanding ultra-high performance.
The culmination of this rethink was the Radeon HD 4870 Launched in mid 2008, it was half the price of Nvidia's competing GeForce GTX 280 but delivered at least 80 per cent of the performance. It was a winning combination.
By,
Abhishek Shankar