Industry Accelerates Production Pipeline With Standards-Based Real-Time Rendering Capabilities Enabled By ATI Graphics Hardware.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SIGGRAPH 2003

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 29, 2003

Leading Application Vendors Demonstrate Hardware Accelerated

Rendering within Their Applications

ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY)(NASDAQ:ATYT) is demonstrating hardware accelerated rendering using three of the industry's leading workstation applications at SIGGRAPH (BOOTH# 2936). With FireGL(TM), users can experience the seamless integration of hardware accelerated rendering into their favorite application and see how it can accelerate the production pipeline.

ATI has worked closely with Alias(R), Discreet and Softimage, leading application vendors for the digital content creation (DCC) community, to seamlessly integrate hardware accelerated rendering into their applications. This integration allows users to view real-time cinematic previews within the application using OpenGL(R) Shading Language and Microsoft(R) DirectX(R) 9 HLSL. Real-time previewing and hardware accelerated rendering will slash the amount of time users will have to wait for rendering to be completed in a traditional software renderer. This will allow them to revise their models and affects on the fly, speeding up their production pipeline.

"Collaborating with leading application vendors, using industry standard APIs, is the surest way to advance the industry," said Dinesh Sharma, Director of Workstation Products, ATI Technologies. "Software and hardware innovations need to move forward in lock-step to best benefit the end-user. This is a perfect example of how industry partnership can lead to real, tangible benefits for our customers."

"Interactively creating OpenGL Shading Language from arbitrary shader networks that can be previewed and adjusted in real-time is a breakthrough for our Maya 5 customers," said Shai Hinitz, Maya Product Manager, Alias. "Having the ability to process shaders and procedurals on board the graphics card is the next logical step in hardware rendering. ATI's support for the OpenGL Shading Language running on its FireGL accelerators, allows our customers to use an industry standard interface to preview real-time final quality imagery from within Maya 5."

"The potential to view cinematic-quality materials in real-time within the Discreet 3ds max 6 interactive viewport will be a tremendous advance in production efficiency," said Jeff Yates, Director of 3D Software Development for Discreet. "Microsoft DirectX 9 High-level Shader Language (HLSL) is a core component of 3ds max 6 that takes advantage of ATI's FireGL graphics accelerators, illustrating the tight link between hardware and software vendors which is essential to the delivery of real-time rendering to our customer base."

"ATI's commitment to drive real-time rendering to new heights is exemplified by their focus on delivering their latest advancements in VPU hardware, combined with industry standard interfaces and tight integration within the SOFTIMAGE/XSI software," said Marc Stevens, Director of Research and Development for Softimage. "SOFTIMAGE/XSI v 3.5 combined with FireGL accelerators allows for interactive shader development directly within our content creation application using OpenGL Shading Language or Microsoft HLSL This speeds up the iterative development cycle and helps broaden opportunities where real-time cinematic previewing can be beneficial to our users."

For more information on hardware accelerated rendering, please visit www.ati.com/FireGL. To see the applications in action, visit ATI's booth (#2936) at SIGGRAPH.

Company Background

ATI Technologies Inc. is a world leader in the design and manufacture of innovative 3D graphics and digital media silicon solutions. An industry pioneer since 1985, ATI is the world's foremost visual processor unit (VPU) provider and is dedicated to deliver leading-edge performance solutions for the full range of PC and Mac desktop and notebook platforms, workstation, set-top and digital television, game console and handheld markets. With 2002 revenues in excess of US $1 billion, ATI has more than 1,900 employees in the Americas, Europe and Asia. ATI common shares trade on NASDAQ (ATYT) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (ATY).

Copyright 2003 ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. ATI and ATI product and product feature names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ATI Technologies Inc. Alias is a registered trademark of Alias Systems, a division of Silicon Graphics Limited in the US and/or other countries worldwide. All other company and product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners. Features, pricing, availability and specifications are subject to change without notice.

For media or industry analyst support, visit our Web site at http://www.ati.com.