ATI Technologies

» see ati.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i had ati cards in my pc for years. the first one i remember was a rage 128 in a self-built tower around 2000 or 2001, bought from a small computer shop in ankara that imported retail boxes through istanbul. after that came a radeon 9550, a budget card from the 9700-pro generation that punched above its weight on counter-strike 1.6 in the internet cafe years, then a radeon hd 4670 around 2009 right as the brand was about to be retired. ati was always the cheaper alternative to nvidia on the donanimhaber forum spec lists and the cheaper alternative was what i could afford on a student budget. honestly, the driver complaints in the forum signatures were universal but the price-per-frame argument always won.

ati was founded in markham ontario in august 1985 by K.Y. ho and three co-founders out of hong kong, originally as array technology inc. the early business was oem 2d graphics chips for ibm pc clones, the wonder and mach lines that shipped on countless beige-box motherboards through the late 80s and into the 90s. the company went public on toronto in 1993 and on nasdaq in 1995. the rage series in 1996 added 3d acceleration, the rage 128 in 1998 was the first card that gave 3dfx any real pressure on a price point a household could afford. honestly, that was the moment ati stopped being a 2d shop and started being a gpu company.

the radeon brand launched on april 4 2000 with the R100 chip, positioned directly against nvidia's geforce 2. for two years ati was the second-place option, then the R300 / radeon 9700 pro shipped in august 2002 and briefly inverted the entire market. the 9700 pro had directx 9 support a full generation ahead of nvidia, the 9800 series in 2003 extended the lead, and ati ended up with the bigger half of the high-end gpu market for the first time in its history. amd announced the $5.4 billion acquisition on july 24 2006 and closed it on october 25 2006. the brand kept shipping for four more years under amd until the august 30 2010 sunset that put new cards under the AMD Radeon name.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

the R300 chip is the one that turned ati from second place into the company that nvidia had to react to. the 9700 pro shipped august 2002 at $399 with a 256-bit memory bus and eight pixel pipelines, on a process node that ran cooler than nvidia's geforce fx that came late and ran hot. the directx 9 implementation was clean enough that half-life 2 ran better on radeon than on geforce for the first two years of the game's life. honestly, valve's own benchmark numbers said as much in the leaked internal slides from 2003. the radeon 9550 and 9600 covered the mid-range and the budget tiers, the line was solid top to bottom, and the radeon brand had a moment of legitimate dominance that ati had not had before and would not have again.

~ the fall ~

nvidia recovered with the geforce 6 series in 2004 and ati spent the rest of the decade trading the lead back and forth. the X1000 series in 2005 was competitive but expensive to manufacture, the hd 2900 in 2007 was a hot loud disappointment that came months late. the linux driver situation was a recurring forum complaint, with fglrx (the proprietary driver) lagging nvidia's binary blob on every distro and the open source radeon driver still years from feature parity. amd had been struggling against intel on the cpu side at the same time, and the july 2006 acquisition was supposed to give amd a cpu-plus-gpu portfolio story that intel could not match. honestly, the integration was painful for both halves, and the brand cleanup followed.

~ what got buried with it ~

the engineering survived, the brand did not. amd retired the ati name on august 30 2010 with the hd 6000 series, every gpu after that point shipped as AMD Radeon. the markham office continued operating as amd's main gpu engineering site through the 2010s, with the same teams that had shipped the R300 and the southern islands architecture still doing the work. the only thing that actually died on august 30 2010 was the small red ati logo on the corner of every retail box, replaced by the amd arrow. honestly, for those of us who had a radeon 9550 or a 9600 xt in a beige tower around 2003, the brand was already the canadian half of a five-year duel with a green-and-black competitor, and the duel kept going under the new name. the duel is still going under the new name as of 2026.

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