Though ATI didn't have a booth presence this year, Chris Bentley was on hand for a little Q&A regarding the GPU maker's past, present, and future plans regarding Apple and Mac gaming in general. According to Chris, the relationship between Apple and ATI continues to remain strong, with 10 ATI products in 2006 having made it into various Apple products.

One of the biggest developments in recent memory is the implementation of multi-threaded OpenGL. Though ATI doesn't take any direct credit, Chris notes that they did nudge an initially reluctant Apple in the right direction. Once the performance gains were seen, Apple picked up the ball from there. Thanks to this, along with the switch to Intel processors, ATI has managed to narrow the Mac/PC performance to a small margin.

In info related to OpenGL, Chris adds that both ATI and Nvidia are collaborating to make sure that it doesn't fall behind DX10. While OpenGL is currently missing features that DX10 boasts, both graphics companies are working hard to migrate those features over.

As for future plans, we couldn't get any direct news, but the promise of a large leap in the coming year over the X1900 was given.

ATI

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