When ATI became a player to be reckoned with in the graphics card market

The graphics card industry can now often be perceived as virtually stagnant, but it was different shortly after the turn of the millennium. In 2002, the then second-place and former third-place holders took the magazine by the mouth and launched the Radeon 9700 Pro, the market’s first graphics card for consumers with a 256-bit memory bus and support for DirectX 9 with Shader Model 2.0.

In addition to the specifications impressing on the paper, the card proved to be a real performance best, especially in high resolutions with edge smoothing and anisotropic filtering. It took Nvidia another two to three generations of products to catch up, and vips, the previous second choice had secured its place as a player to be reckoned with.

Under the slogan “GPUJune”, the channel Pixel Pipes discusses the card’s launch, its performance and what Nvidia’s backlash looked like when it went. If you search further on the channel, there are new tests of many old graphics cards, in the games of the time but on machines that are significantly more competent than what was usual with contemporary systems.