The introduction of ATI"s Radeon X800 series completed a one-two punch of killer developments for graphics chips, as ATI countered NVIDIA"s GeForce 6800 with its own 16-pipe monster capable of astonishing performance. These new chips are very evenly matched in terms of performance, so we"ve interrogated ATI"s David Nalasco about places where they differ: shader models, OpenGL performance, antialiasing methods, and the cards themselves. We"ve also discussed some of the questions raised by the controversial discovery of ATI"s adaptive trilinear filtering algorithm. Read on for an in-depth discussion about the hottest graphics issues of the day.
TR: Your title is Technology Marketing Manager. What does your role at ATI entail?
Nalasco: I go over the specs of our new products and kind of look at all the new technologies that we"re introducing and try and figure out what are the most interesting, then come up with ways to explain that both internally and externally. All the technologies like SMARTSHADER and SMOOTHVISION and things like that, I come up with what is included in those things and come up with ideas on how to demonstrate them. I also try to keep track of upcoming trends in the industry, and try and feed back some of the input we get from developers, from our users, and things like that into what features we incorporate in future products.