NEWS • SEPTEMBER 13 , 2000
Radeon Comes to Mac
Apple Store offers new card in build to order systems

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

ATI has started shipping its Radeon graphics accelerator for the Mac, and Apple has started offering the card (exclusively as of press time) as an addon for build to order systems via the Apple Store. The Radeon option will ad $100 to any G4 or G4 Cube order. Prior to a public relations fiasco around the time of Macworld New York earlier this summer, the Radeon card was expected to ship standard with some Mac systems. (Some iMacs that reached retail floors even indicated on their boxes that their graphics were powered by Radeon.) But now it's official.

The Mac Radeon card is presently limited to one configuration with 32 MB RAM. (A 64 MB version is available for the PC.) ATI's Web site shows both an AGP and PCI version available, but neither was available through ATI's online store as of press time. The card includes both a DVI-I connector for digital flat panels and an SVGA for standard analog monitors. It has "full support" for OpenGL, according to ATI, as well as QuickDraw 3D and QuickTime acceleration. It also includes a TV-out port.

3D acceleration features include:

• Integrated Transformation, Clipping and Lighting
• Charisma Engine
• Pixel Tapestry Architecture
• Twin Cache Architecture
• Texture Cache
• Superscalar Rendering
• Single-Pass Multi-texturing
• True Color Rendering
• Triangle Setup Engine
• Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering
• Line & Edge Anti-aliasing
• Full screen Anti-aliasing
• Specular Highlights
• Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping
• Mip-Mapping
• Z-buffering and Double-buffering
• Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid and Cubic environment mapping
• Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing.

The retail versions of ATI's PC Radeon cards sells for $280 for the 32 MB version and $400 for the AGP version. For more information, visit http://www.ati.com or http://www.apple.com.

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