digitalFAQ.com Forum - ATI cards were named according to DirectX support?

I found some confirmation to a guess made some time ago from an article posted in the year 2002

ATI nomenclature explained

Quote:

FROM THE FIRST moment ATI introduced its 9X00 generation of cards we were a bit confused.

We couldn't work out whether ATI had changed its naming logic or not.

Last year (2001) ATI decided to change the name of all its cards to indicate the version of DirectX they supported. So the original Radeon and its derivatives where renamed Radeon 7x00

[where the 'x' represents a number that can vary between 0, 2, 5 or even 7].

Later Radeons that support DirectX 8 and its features were renamed 8500 where first digit represented DX 8 support. Current Radeon's 9000 and 9700 should both support DirectX 9 since their name starts with a 9, but it appears ATI has changed its mind.

The Radeon 9000 and 9000 PRO support DirectX 8.1 but not DirectX 9

But the Radeon 9700 does support DirectX 9

This leads us to wonder what the standard of naming it's cards ATI is choosing this time around. Its clear that with the 9000 generation, the first digit does not indicate DirectX support and we are waiting for an explanation from ATI at this time.

The site was apparently a close ATI watcher of the time and posted many articles about it, up through the acquisition of the company and short resurrection of the All-In-Wonder brand name in 2006 that bonded it with Vista MCE edition.

I think the 9000 cards simply preceded the release of DirectX 9 and they released drivers with support for what was available at the time. We've seen updates to the released drivers often work with older cards, hinting ATI had the hardware ready before Microsoft was ready with new DirectX releases.

By the time the 9700 cards were released DirectX 9 was available and they continued with this logic, updating support for the earlier cards to support DirectX 9.

The mention of the 10000 cards probably led to the release of the XX00 series like the X600 and X800 and probably were meant to coincide with DirectX 10.

Its nice to know

7x00 was DX7
8x00 was DX8
9x00 was DX9
Xx00 was DX10

Roughly each version was also a new release of Windows.

A later article confirmed the 9700 did not ship with DirectX 9 because Bob wasn't your Uncle ? :huh2: