ATI Technologies Inc. officially announced the availability today of the Radeon 8500 Mac Edition graphics card. It’s the new flagship graphics card for Mac users from ATI. ATI said that the Radeon 8500 Mac Edition graphics board should be available at retailers beginning today with a suggested retail price of US$299.
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Additionally, the company announced a “Supercharge your Power Mac G4” promotion that enables Power Mac G4 users with either the Radeon 7500 or GeForce4 MX-equipped card to get a $150 rebate if purchasing the new card.
The rebate program runs through the end of May. If you’re interested in taking advantage of it are directed to visit ATI’s Web site, you’ll be asked to provide identifying information for you Power Mac G4 and existing graphics card. Once you get the Radeon 8500 and return your existing video card, ATI will credit your credit card $150.
The Radeon 8500 Mac Edition card is designed to work both in Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. The Radeon 8500 Mac Edition incorporates Hyper Z II, a memory bandwidth conservation method, Charisma Engine II, ATI’s latest and greatest transform, clipping and lighting engine; Pixel Tapestry II, the company’s new 3D rendering technology, which uses four rendering pipelines, and Video Immersion II, the latest revision to the company’s digital video and DVD playback engine.
The new high-end card also features advanced effects like Truform, ATI’s rendering technology that smooths and makes more natural-looking polygonal 3D graphics. Smoothvision, ATI’s full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) technology, is also included — the company said that it would add support for this in an upcoming driver release by mid-April. The Radeon 8500 also includes Smartshader, the company’s programmable pixel and vertex shader technology.
The Radeon 8500 Mac Edition sports a DVI-I connector, VGA and TV-out connectors, and it supports multiple displays. For example, you can hook up a digital flat panel display to the DVI-I connector, and a VGA monitor or television, and have different output appearing on different displays.
ATI said the Radeon 8500 Mac Edition works with any Power Mac equipped with an AGP slot and Mac OS 9.2.1 or Mac OS X 10.1 or later.