I had a Radeon 9800! I got it for around 320 Euros and it was such a good card. That card and Farcry... Bliss

Usually news like this is a bad one. Really bad one.

Hasbro chewed Microprose and FASA Interactive. EA ate Origin and Westwood. And now AMD is swallowing up ATi.

And we have to deal with their "wastes"?

Sometimes, I feel like want to wear the "Silencer" suit as in Crusader : No Remorse/Regret and freeze, blast and burn every corporate *#@&#*!!

Well AMD has bought ATI ages ago. But they kept the ATI brand name alive...

So nothing much should change. They will just be called AMD Radeon...

It's almost like NVidia killing off 3Dfx.

I honestly dont care, I dont know why they didnt do this 4 years ago.

Bigger brand awareness for AMD.

Lets start a rumour that amd graphics cards only work with amd cpus. mwahhaha

I don't doubt that will start to happen.

"Oh yeah I bought an AMD Computer and the guy said the AMD Video card was more compatible with my AMD Computer than the NVIDIA video card"

heh.

It's almost like NVidia killing off 3Dfx.

It's not at all like Nvidia killing 3DFX. AMD just rebrands, renames ATI to AMD. Nvidia KILLED 3DFX, that's really something different...

It's nothing more than rebranding guys. It should have happened 4 years ago when AMD bought ATi in the first place. They just decided to drop the ATi name and keep going with AMD. Nothing serious. And like Dominus said Nvidia pretty much pwned 3dfx in every way imaginable. So stop whining.

This is going to be a huge mistake. The ATi name is a much more valuable brand than AMD.

I'm in the "don't care" crowd. Names don't matter. The product is what matters.

sliderider wrote:

This is going to be a huge mistake. The ATi name is a much more valuable brand than AMD.

I don't have any idea which brand is stronger but AMD says their name is. I don't think either brand is exceptionally strong. AMD is often seen as the "cheap secondary option" and ATI has that perpetual stigma attached still from their olden times of shitty drivers. Obviously these traits are only prevalent among people who can't really think for themselves.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3878/farewell-t … later-this-year

swaaye wrote:

I'm in the "don't care" crowd. Names don't matter. The product is what matters. […]
Show full quote

I'm in the "don't care" crowd. Names don't matter. The product is what matters.

sliderider wrote:

This is going to be a huge mistake. The ATi name is a much more valuable brand than AMD.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3878/farewell-t … later-this-year

I saw that and it's absolutely not true. ATi has roots in the graphic card business that go back farther than nVidia and the only graphics card experience AMD has is through ATi so do you really think AMD will sell more graphic cards under the AMD name than the ATi name? I don't think so.

This is going to be a misstep as big as the one Macy's made when they renamed all the Marshall Fields stores in the Chicago area to Macy's after the buyout and ended up alienating a lot of loyal Marshall Fields customers.

It's a good thing I already decided my next card will be a GTX460. Radeon may not be around that long.

sliderider wrote:

I saw that and it's absolutely not true. ATi has roots in the graphic card business that go back farther than nVidia and the only graphics card experience AMD has is through ATi so do you really think AMD will sell more graphic cards under the AMD name than the ATi name? I don't think so.

This is going to be a misstep as big as the one Macy's made when they renamed all the Marshall Fields stores in the Chicago area to Macy's after the buyout and ended up alienating a lot of loyal Marshall Fields customers.

I think you are giving their customers too much credit. Most people are not aware of ATI having made EGA cards. 😀 What matters is recent history, perhaps 10 years. They also had that period of ultra shitty software support (Rage -> Radeon 8500) that made a lot of people quite wary of them.

I think video cards are only bought by people who are not going to be phased by a simple name change. Especially when the Radeon brand isn't going anywhere.

If the Radeon 6000 series were to suck ass then that would definitely be much more of an issue than any name tweak. If the 6000 series is amazing, it will validate the new name.

I'd hope they would hire a more able driver development crew. I have may ATi cards and, man, Catalyst seems to be getting worse every passing day.

I am also in the "I don't care" section for name rebranding.

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

I am also in the "I don't care" section for name rebranding.

Same here. I'm just not sure that everyone thinks the same way. ATI is pretty well known while AMD is fairly unknown to most people not into computers (like virtually all my family members 🤣. They think Intel is the only one making CPU's these days)

Edit:On the other hand this could work out well for AMD. If they can market to the people that they are a big company, world leader in dedicated graphics cards, as well as being the second largest CPU manufacturer in the world (not to mention their chipset division), it could increase AMD's reputation as a company that makes solid hardware.

sliderider wrote:

The ATi name is a much more valuable brand than AMD.

The AMD brand doesn't have the 'worst drivers ever' reputation from the '90s days 😀

Well, I'd rather have a bad driver (ATI) then a bad card (NVidia).
Atleast ATI (AMD) knows how to solder chips to pcb's 😜

As a Canadian I can't tell you how offended I am that ATi (based right here in my backyard), was sold off to the fucking texans (AMD). Texas is like the anti-Canada. Dropping the name is just reopening the wound. I was also a fan of 3dfx, and I never thought I'd live to see the day where I went out and bought an "nshittia" based card.

Wow, guys, i didn't expect so many comments in a single night.

They were pretty good in the 9700/9800 up to X1800 era, and recently in the HD 4000 and HD 5000 family (and 6000 is coming with some wild performance, rumor says).

I wasn't too fond of ATI until the 8500/9700 era (got myself a humble 8500LE and then i caved in away from the 3D world for some years). My current card is an "N" GTX 470 though (just sold one, aiming for 2GB 460's), only because i need the CUDA. And likely i'm going to need a lot of "N" cards during the next year -- at least until OpenCL support for my app is matured. They really need to kick themselves hard in this area..

Anonymous Coward wrote:

As a Canadian I can't tell you how offended I am that ATi (based right here in my backyard), was sold off to the fucking texans (AMD). Texas is like the anti-Canada. Dropping the name is just reopening the wound. I was also a fan of 3dfx, and I never thought I'd live to see the day where I went out and bought an "nshittia" based card.

Well, i'm not Canadian nor Texan but my favourite color is RED, so maybe i feel a bit offended too that a RED is eaten alive by something green 😁. They seem to be smart enough to keep it RED, though.

Btw, are there still a lot of boxed 9700 Pros left in Canada, AC? Or in your backyard maybe ... ? 😊

The only problems I had with Catalyst drivers were for Windows 9x and none when it came to 2000/XP/Vista/7

I've owned both ATi and nVidia cards and didn't have many issues with either the hardware or driver packages.

The name change is really a marketing thing, note that AMD kept the brand name going for 4+ years as they built the GPU technology up to where it is now.

Their next step is the same on-die melding of CPU+GPU silicon for the mainstream computing arena, this is why they are making the name change for this technology that will be introduced later on this year 😉

Say what you will but this is where most new computer hardware is sold not to high-end gamers nor the budget minded crowd.