Famous Graphics Chips: ATI’s Radeon 8500

The Radeon 8500 AIB launched by ATI in August 2001 used a 150-nm manufacturing process, for its R200 (codename, Chaplin) GPU. The AIB worked with DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3 APIs. The R200 introduced several new and enhanced features, but the most noteworthy was the ATI TruForm feature. TruForm was a Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) block developed by ATI (now AMD) for hardware acceleration of tessellation. The following diagram is a simple example of a tessellation pipeline rendering a sphere from a crude cubic vertex set. Tessellation can reduce or expand the number of triangles (polygons) in a 3D model. (Source: