MARKHAM, Ontario - ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY, NASDAQ:ATYT) today introduced the FIRE GL™ X1 workstation graphics board, based on the recently announced RADEON™ 9700 Visual Processing Unit (VPU). ATI's FIRE GL X1, scheduled to be available in October 2002, is the first in the world to deliver a fully programmable floating point architecture in OpenGL® 2.0 and Microsoft® DirectX® 9, with double the performance of any product currently on the market.

The FIRE GL X1 is also the first in the industry to offer eight parallel rendering pipelines - providing twice the rendering power of any competing product - giving digital content creators the ability to preview finished scenes in real time, saving days of production time. In addition, the FIRE GL X1 will offload complex data calculations from the CPU, therefore freeing up horsepower to accelerate the production pipeline.

"The FIRE GL X1 represents a significant breakthrough in the workstation market," said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President, Marketing and General Manager, Desktop, ATI Technologies Inc. "Its revolutionary architecture and raw power will be the only choice for artists, developers and engineers who want to create and refine digital content at unprecedented levels of versatility and speed."

ATI's FIRE GL X1 128-bit full floating point pipeline architecture now makes it possible to compile higher level shaders from leading digital content creation (DCC) software such as
Aliaswavefront's Maya®, Discreet's 3ds max™, Side Effects Software's Houdini™ and Softimage's XSI™ onto its graphics accelerator.

Feature set

The fully programmable floating point architecture feature set of the FIRE GL X1 includes:

• Ability to generate real time photo-realistic renderings;
• Unlimited color range beyond 16.7 million colors;
• True error-free and "loss less" multipass; and
• Fully programmable architecture.

Revolutionary new architecture coupled with extreme performance
The groundbreaking architecture of the FIRGE GL X1 is complemented by 256MB DDR memory and a 256-bit memory interface that removes hardware performance bottleneck and provides digital content creators and CAD engineers with faster 3D graphics. The FIRE GL X1 also supports AGP 8X, providing a two-way high-speed interface between the graphics subsystem and the workstation at a speed of 2.0 GB per second.

Highest level of photo-realism
With SMARTSHADER™ 2.0 and fully programmable floating point precision, the FIRE GL X1 is the first workstation graphics architecture to fully support Microsoft DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0 in one single solution. The implementation supports up to 16 textures per rendering pass with Pixel Shaders 2.0 and vertex programs of up to 1,024 instructions with flow control. This architecture enables digital content creators to create complex visual effects and run leading DCC and CAD software programs in real time without losing image quality.

The FIRE GL X1 also features dual integrated display controllers with dual monitor support, and quad buffered stereo graphics support that enables stereographic display.