ATI fights Nvidia with T&L support

Graphics world squares up for big fight

ATI has seen the future of PC Gaming. And it's called T&L (transform and lighting). The graphics giant has revealed plans to launch two products which support the technology. ATI's motherboard chipset will have an integrated 3D graphic card in the chipset with a T&L feature. This solution will be similar to Intel's i810 chipset except the graphics card will be more serious then Intel's. Integrated T&L on a chipsets will bring cool features to many consumer (low end market) homes. Mainboards based on this chipset will hit the market very soon, perhaps as early as this spring. ATI is also developing its next generation technology, which will have T&L with a new Clipping feature. Nvidia already has that in its NV15 and NV11 chips. Its new chip will support DX7 and some new things from chip will be supported in DirectX 8. So far there is no news about a mobile chip from ATI, but with NV11 on the market soon, we suggest it won't be long before the company jumps on that bandwagon too. ATI remains the world's top manufacturer for graphics adapters, but its position in the 3D gaming market has been seriously damaged by Nvidia, and others. Its current AFR technology and 64MB RAM on its ATI fury MAXX cards is just not good enough to fight the Nvidia GPUs, especially in the future. ATI could lose the battle in the 3D gaming arena with its two chip solution. Besides 64MB of memory, there's also got to be some good T&L technology. In the short term, this does not matter -- as there is not much in the way of T&L product in the market. Yet. However, leading game developers have committed to T&L, and more than 30 titles based on this technology - and which will only work well with this technology -- will be available in the Autumn. Nvidia had T&L (transform and lighting) as early as last November, according to some reports. But when you look at this Nvidia page, you've got to wonder whether this transform and lighting stuff is worth a brass penny. It claims that the real world looks like this. ®