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ATI launched the Radeon 9800, 9600 and 9200 visual-processor families for enthusiast, performance and mainstream PCs. Gateway, Fujitsu Siemens, NEC and specialist system builders announced systems using the new boards, while ATI partners prepared retail products.
The Radeon 9800 targeted the top end with a 256-bit memory interface, eight pixel pipelines, programmable shaders, floating-point precision, DirectX 9 and OpenGL support. ATI presented the combination as retaining image quality under demanding real-time 3D workloads.
The Radeon 9600 used four pixel pipelines, two vertex engines and a 130 nm process. It supported DirectX 9, OpenGL, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at a lower price tier.
The Radeon 9200 used a four-pipeline architecture with AGP 8×, DirectX 8.1 and video de-blocking. All three families used ATI’s unified Catalyst driver suite, which included a WHQL-certified DirectX 9 driver.
