The battle in the graphics card market between AMD and NVIDIA has been going on for several years now, but AMD has not always made graphics cards and its origin is in a company called ATI Technologies, which is the origin of the Radeon Technology Group. Join us on this journey where we are going to tell you the story of AMD’s GPU division.
AMD’s GPU division was born in 1985 as Array Technology Incorporated, the company specialized from the beginning in the creation of graphics chips for use in PC graphics cards, the first being the ATI Graphics Solution Rev 3, which it was a card with the ability to reproduce graphics in CGA and Hercules modes.
Due to this versatility it became very famous at the time since it avoided the use of several different types of graphics card in a PC depending on the type of monitor.
ATI Wonder Series
ATI began to make a name for itself from its EGA Wonder, a graphics card under the EGA standard that combined the Graphics Solution Rev 3 chipset with an EGA chip from Chips Technologies, so this card could handle various graphics standards without having To have multiple adapters, which gave enormous compatibility in the face of the huge confusion of PC graphics standards.
The card was succeeded by the ATI VGA Wonder, which included a VGA chipset developed by ATI itself and maintained compatibility with the rest of previous standards.
ATI Mach series
In 1990 ATI continued making clones of IBM standards, with the ATI Mach 8 they made a clone of the IBM 8514 / A graphics chip, which was the beginning of the XGA standard, this standard allowed a screen resolution of 1024 × 768 pixels, with a 256-color palette, or 640 × 480 with 16 bits per pixel (65,536 colors).
The particularity of this standard is that it was born as a parallel extension to VGA for professional monitors. Its biggest advantage? It was the addition of Blitter-style graphical operations like those in the Commodore Amiga. So visual operations like drawing lines, copying blocks or filling the color of a shape ended up being possible without having to use CPU cycles for it.
Once the pre-VGA graphics standards were completely out of date, ATI launched the ATI Mach 32, which included a VGA core, thus unifying the ATI Wonder and ATI Mach series into one, although ATI continued to use the ATI Wonder name for certain products. outside of its main range of graphics cards, such as video decoders.
Starting with the ATI MACH64, they unified the VGA chipset and the MACH into a single graphics processor.
ATI Rage Series
The huge success of 3Dfx’s Voodoo Graphics and the emergence of games based on real-time 3D graphics caused companies like ATI to catch up to avoid disappearing from the graphics card market.
The problem with most graphics cards is that CPUs, since the standardization of the Intel Pentium in homes, rendered game scenes in 3D much faster than using graphics cards of the time.
ATI’s solution was to modify its ATI MACH64 chipset to make a series of changes that would make its range of graphics cards competitive, the changes were as follows:
- The ability to process textures and filter them was added, for that a 4 KB texture cache was added.
- Added a Triangle Setup or raster unit.
However, the first ATI Rage arrived late and although they had the power of a Voodoo Graphics, they paled compared to the Voodoo 2 and Riva TNT, ATI’s response was none other than expanding the number of texture units from 1 to 2 and place a 128-bit bus, which they sold under the name ATI Rage 128 ..
Another card that stood out within the ATI Rage range was the FURY MAXX, which was the first ATI graphics card to implement what in the future would end up being Crossfire technology, this allowed ATI to place two Rage 128 chips in one card.
ATI Radeon 7500
ATI abandoned the Rage brand starting with the first Radeon, which was the company’s first DirectX 7-capable card. It made use of the ATI R100 GPU that had initially been named Rage 7, in reality it was nothing more than a Rage 128 with an integrated T&L unit and is that the full support of DirectX 7, implied the implementation of units that calculate the geometry of the scene when rendering 3D scenes in real time.
So the Radeon 7500 at heart was nothing more than a Rage 128 with the fixed function units for the geometry calculation. It did not have the same performance as the first and second generation GeForces that came out at the same time, but it was the turning point for the company to make the necessary change.
ATI Radeon 9700
The ATI Radeon 9700 under the R300 chipset became one of the most important graphics cards in the history of ATI, if not the most important of all, and is equivalent to the first NVIDIA GeForce in terms of impact.
In order to be competitive, AMD bought the startup ArtX, which was founded by the same former Silicon Graphics engineers who had worked on the 3D technology of the Nintendo64 and Nintendo GameCube consoles. The result of the purchase? The R300 GPU, with which ATI was at the forefront.
In addition, they had the perfect storm, since the launch of the Radeon 9700 coincided with the biggest skid of NVIDIA in all its history, the GeForce FX, the legend of the ATI Radeon had begun and the rivalry between NVIDIA and ATI began from that point in the story.
ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series
ATI’s first graphics card with unified PC shaders appeared later than the GeForce 8800, despite being implemented by ATI for the first time in history with the Xbox 360 GPU.
However, the architecture was completely different and you cannot compare the GPU of the Microsoft console with the architecture of the R600, which, in its most powerful version, the Radeon HD 2900 had about 320 ALUs, which under the architecture Terascale is 64 VLIW5 units and therefore 4 Compute Units.
However, the ATI R600 GPUs on which the Radeon HD 2000 were based were a disappointment, as they were not able to compete head-to-head against the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 8800. A year later, ATI launched the HD series. 3000 under the 55nm node and polishing off some design flaws from the R600 architecture, but it wasn’t a major leap.
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Following the fiasco of the R600 architecture variants, AMD decided to scale the R600 architecture from 320 ALUSs to 800 ALUs, thereby creating the R700 architecture that started with the ATI Radeon HD 4000 in which the HD 4870 became the the absolute queen, again ATI had regained the throne in terms of performance.
ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
Instead of designing a completely new architecture from scratch for DirectX 11, ATI decided to release the R800 chipset, which was an R700, but optimized and improved for DirectX 11, well, it wasn’t actually optimized for DirectX 11 but ATI released Terascale 2 as a way to get out of trouble.
ATI Radeon HD 7000 series
The HD 7000 Series was the first to use the Graphics Core Next architecture on which AMD GPUs were based for several generations of graphics cards.
The GCN architecture was a total change in the organization of Compute Units compared to Terascale architectures, since these went from being composed of 16 VLIW4 units to 4 SIMD16 units.
This is the longest-lived AMD architecture in the company’s history, from the Radeon HD 7000 that appeared on the market in 2012 to the Radeon VII that was released in 2019. The architecture has been superseded by the new architecture. RDNA 2, which is in the second generation and has a third on the way.
