Press Release - Archives 2000

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Toronto, Ontario - ATI Technologies Inc. (TSE:ATY, NASDAQ:ATYT) today welcomed the introduction of the Video2000 benchmark from MadOnion.com, the first comprehensive video benchmark that will allow the industry and consumers alike to gauge the quality and performance of competing video acceleration solutions for the desktop and mobile computer.

While benchmarks for 2D and 3D acceleration have been in use for a number of years, such tests proved unsuccessful in determining the relative merits of video solutions (such as DVD playback), leaving reviewers and consumers to make subjective judgements under less than ideal conditions. Such usual testing elements as benchmark speed, polygon through-puts and frame rates that are essential elements to 2D and 3D testing, were largely irrelevant to video quality and performance.

Video2000 is a completely new type of benchmarking tool designed for testing and evaluating the video quality, performance and features available in modern graphics adapters. For the first time in benchmarking, a range of quality tests allow for the measurement of image quality, while the performance and feature tests indicate how well the system would perform in a real-world environment.

"Video on the desktop and notebook PC is an area where consumers are looking for assurances that they are getting the best quality," said Jewelle Schiedel-Webb, director of the visual products group, ATI. "MadOnion's Video2000 provides a solid test which makes it very clear who the top video solutions providers really are. We look forward to future versions of the benchmark which we expect to encompass an even wider range of multimedia features such as video capture and TV-out."

Video2000 examines three main components of the video pipeline: the graphics adapter; the software DVD player and the CPU. Nearly all of the results from Video2000 will be affected by a combination of these three components. How each component affects each individual score is heavily test dependant.

Independent testing from top hardware review sites, SharkyExtreme and HotHardware, places ATI's mainstream graphics board, the Rage Fury PRO, at the top of the list in all major categories, including superior video quality and providing more features than any other graphics adapter. ATI's video technology is integrated into all of its graphics chips and its board products. From its top rated DVD, MPEG-2 decode technology to the industry leading RAGE Theater TV-out technology to ATI's soon to be announced DTV product, ATI is the computer industry's leader in video acceleration.

SharkyExtreme's test results
Test system Pentium III 600Mhz
128 MB of RAM

ATI's RAGE 128 PRO: 2542
S3's Savage 2000: 2422
Nvidia's Geforce DDR: 2316
Matrox's G400MAX: 2247
3dfx's Voodoo3: 2002

For more details please go to www.sharkyextreme.com

HotHardware's test results
Test system Pentium III 750Mhz
128 MB of RAM

ATI's RAGE 128 PRO: 2555
Nvidia's Geforce DDR: 2485
Matrox's G400: 2390
3dfx's Voodoo3: 1845

For more details please go to www.hothardware.com

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Company Profile

ATI Technologies Inc., the world's largest supplier of 3D graphics and multimedia technology, designs, manufactures and markets innovative and award-winning multimedia solutions and graphics components for the personal computer, set-top box and consumer electronics appliance markets. An ISO 9002 company, ATI is the world's leading supplier of video and 2D/3D graphics accelerators to OEM and retail customers. Founded in 1985, ATI employs more than 1,700 people at headquarters in Thornhill, Ontario, and in offices in the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Barbados, Malaysia, Japan and Hong Kong. ATI is a public company whose shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.

Contact Information

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