ATI Technologies announced today its new multimedia graphics card ALL-IN-WONDER based on the RADEON 9000 PRO graphics processor. The product is available in retail and online stores around North America and also as an option from Dell Computer.

RADEON 9000 PRO graphics processor implements four rendering pipelines with one texture unit per each one, one vertex shader pipeline, DirectX 8.1 features hardware support, including SmartShader 2.0 (processes up to six textures per rendering pass and eight samples per pixel) technology. The GPU is clocked at 275MHz, 64MB DDR SDRAM works at 550MHz.

Like all AIW-series graphics cards, the ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 PRO offers the same feature set as more powerful graphics cards based on other GPUs.

The ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 PRO comes equipped with REMOTE WONDER radio-frequency remote controller, ATI's THEATER 200 VIVO controller, stereo TV-tuner with 125 channels and so on. In addition, the multimedia graphics card provides a lot of exciting software capabilities, such as TV-ON-DEMAND, THRUVIEW, FULLSTREAM, mulTView and so on.

ALL-IN-WONDER 9000 PRO is available now for $199.

The only thing I do not quite understand is why ATI as well as NVIDIA do not start to unveil their inexpensive graphics cards with TV capabilities after the chip appears on the market and is considered as “new”? For instance, it took nearly a year for the GeForce4 MX440 to find itself equipped with TV-tuner on Personal Cinema card and it took about eight months from the RADEON 9000 PRO to make it to AIW. In August or September the AIW based on the RADEON 9000 PRO GPU would have been more popular, while now consumers usually consider the chip as low-end. Well, maybe ATI can venture to perform like this because of the lack of rivals in this market segment. On the other hand, being the number one graphics supplier in 1998, it offered not really fast graphics chips, thinking that the market will forgive it. The outcome is well-known now: NVIDIA’s market share is now larger than ATI’s. The only problem here is that NVIDIA is simply not very active in this segment…