Catalyst drivers for graphic cards and motherboard with Ati chipset Radeon 7000, Radeon 7200, Radeo...

ATI gives the integrated graphics world a kick in the arse, John Gillooly feels the vibrations.

ATIs RADEON 9000 is somewhat deceptively named itd be easy to think of it as the next logical step up from the RADEON 8500 series...

The Radeon 7500 is the little brother to the Radeon 8500 and is essentially an enhanced version of the original Radeon card, an example of which was tested in this round-up as a yardstick and included in the performance graphs (pages 50-51). It features the Charisma Engine; ATIs equivalent of the T&L engine found in GeForce-based cards.

John Gillooly takes a ride with the limousine version of ATI’s luxury card.

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

Although ATIs Radeon 7500 does not feature the new Charisma Engine II, with technology such as Truform, Smartshader and Hyper Z II, it is still a very competent graphics card targeted at the mid-range 3D graphics market.

It has been a long time coming, but finally there is some serious competition to the mantle assumed by the behemoth that is NVIDIA. The Radeon 8500 is the latest graphics chipset from ATI, which itself is a graphics giant, though does not possess nearly the same public profile in the consumer 3D market. Unlike previous ATI cards that featured exclusively on ATIs own branding and PCB, the Radeon 8500 and 7500 are open to other board manufacturers, presumably to take a bigger bite out of NVIDIAs lucrative market share.

New Radeons optimised for Vista and HD video.

There was once a time when 3dfx ruled the 3D accelerator market, but...

Radeon 4800-series cards are now available for the masses. Radeon 4830 cards are expected to cost less than US$150 at retail, which is roughly the cost of an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT GPU (a chip that it matches up with very closely, at least on paper).

Both graphics card giants have unleashed powerful new additions to their ranks recently, and their battle for supremacy is hotter than ever. We put the new arrivals through their paces

Another of the RADEON 9200 cards in this round-up. Returning almost identical results to the Auriga 9200, this is an average performer, bundled with an outdated game.

This card is the same card as the Bravura Evil Master II, but without the retail extras thrown in. The card itself is a fairly plain-looking affair - a simple green PCB (printed circuit board) with a small cooling fan and heatsink over the GPU, and an array of RAM modules absent of the large RAM heatsinks now commonplace on the NVIDIA models.

Anyone with $400 to spend on a graphics card should currently be looking at a RADEON X800 XL. It boasts the same 16 pipelines as an X800 XT, and also packs 256MB of GDDR3 memory to boot.

A mighty dual-GPU board that makes light work of even today’s toughest DirectX 10 games.

A great media-centre card with some nice features – and at an affordable price

A mighty dual-GPU board that makes light work of even today’s toughest DirectX 10 games

A competent card with older games, but it can’t handle the new generation of games.

With NVIDIA's new graphics chip still a couple of months away from reaching retail stores, ATI's RADEON 9700 is still the undoubted king when it comes to performance: if you want the fastest card available, then you can't go past the 9700.