GrizzBear asks:

A number of card manufactures are claiming HDTV support in their future products. What kind of support is ATI considering? Will future Radeons support component video outputs on a card? What about alternate line rendering (Since most HDTV monitors do 1080 interlaced, and not progressive, I would think alternate line rendering would speed things up a bit)?

Dave Orton: ATI typically does not discuss the specific features of a next-generation technology before it is announced. However, it is safe for you to assume that future ATI graphics technologies will support a full range of HDTV timing modes.

Natester asks:

Although I love the AIW capture capability, I find the dependency on the CPU to do the encoding rather precarious. Even with an Athlon 1Gz chip, encoding at 640X480 Mp2 has dropped frames! Will you consider having either a dedicated encoder chip or using the Radeon's processing power to encode video streams?

Dave Orton: There are no plans to put a hardware-based MPEG-2 encoder chip on an ATI ALL-IN-WONDER graphics board. ATI is continuing to optimize its video encoding software. CPUs and chipset/system memory continue to improve, which improves capture ability and quality. Stay tuned.

Humus asks:

The Radeon is the most feature rich card available right now, but it seems like you've done a few compromises to achieve this. No mipmapping support for 3d textures, trilinear can't be combined with anisotropic (which I've been in contact with ATI for just to find out that it was a hardware limitation and not a driver bug). Will the Radeon II (or whatever it's going to be called) address those problems?

Dave Orton: At ATI, we're constantly driving technology forward. That means both coming up with new features and improving on older ones. Without giving away too much, I can say that, in addition to featuring a range of new technologies appearing for the first time, our next-generation products will also include tweaks and enhancements to RADEON's existing feature-set.

Prospero424 asks:

There has been a lot of recent buzz regarding the Geforce3's support of programmable pixel and vertex shaders and their accompanying "leap forward" in 3D graphics detail. What are the differences in terms of rendering quality between ATi's method of per-pixel/vertex manipulation vs. those used by nVidia in the Geforce3? Will we happy Radeon owners see a similar leap forward in image quality?

Dave Orton: As I mentioned before, most games have yet to use RADEON's full feature-set, let alone those of more recently released graphics processors. It's interesting to note that, since game developers always have to keep the huge installed base of PCs in mind when designing their games, what they choose as the minimum system spec is really what has the biggest effect on the level of graphics they can provide. Supporting the latest and greatest graphics technology is usually a secondary consideration, and only happens if it can be done without a huge amount of additional effort. When developers start raising their minimum graphics requirement from RAGE 128-class products to RADEON-class products, RADEON owners will start to see a major leap forward in image quality for games. We are expecting this to start happening in the second half of 2001.