Livestream 6/23/22 – Radeon DDR

The video card landscape was a bit all over the place in the late 90s. 3dfx with their Voodoo series were at the top of their game but their dominace was waning with competitors coming out with constantly improved solutions. nVidia had hits with their TNT and TNT2 lines and had welcomed board partner manufacturers after 3dfx shunned them. ATI had seen success with their Rage 128 series but by 2000 that was pretty long in the tooth.

ATI decided to make a new video card architecture from the ground up which resulted in the very first Radeon card: The Radeon 64 DDR. While the card was not usually at the top of the benchmarks it was a very solid card. Above all it handled 32 bit color with little performance hit which would have been a decent selling point. ATI took some creative liberties with the different version of the card and it wasn’t always clear which one you were buying. For example the 32 MB version ran at a lower clock rate than the 64 MB version sent out to reviewers. Likely not the first time benchmark results were skewed but it left a bad taste with customers.

Today the 64 DDR in retail format is the one to have as it runs at the highest clock available. It’s still a very solid card albeit without anything in particular standing out. That said it made for a very interesting GPU June stream so check out the replay below.