ArtX was a company formed in 1997 by a group of twenty former

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and sof ...

, Inc. engineers, who had worked on the Nintendo 64's graphics chip. The company was focused on delivering a PC graphics chip that was both high performance and cost effective, and hoped to be able to instantly compete with then-dominant 3dfx and other fledgling competitors such as

nVidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

. ArtX was led by Dr. Wei Yen, who had been SGI's head of Nintendo Operations, the department responsible for the Nintendo 64's fundamental design. David Orton, who was head of the advanced graphics division of Silicon Graphics, was appointed President of ArtX.

History

In late 1997, SGI filed a non-compete lawsuit against ArtX, claiming that the startup's staff of high level SGI alumni would be utilizing SGI's trade secrets. This lawsuit was quietly dropped in 1998. ArtX was contracted in May 1998 to create the system logic and the graphics processor (code named '' Flipper'') for

Nintendo is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade playing cards. ...

's fourth game console (code named "Dolphin"), which would eventually be launched as the

GameCube The is a home video game console developed and released by Nintendo in Japan on September 14, 2001, in North America on November 18, 2001, and in PAL territories in 2002. It is the successor to the Nintendo 64 (1996), and predecessor of the Wi ...

. Nintendo's Howard Lincoln said, "This company is headed up by Dr. Wei Yen, -- the man who was primarily responsible for the N64 graphics chip. Dr. Yen has assembled at ArtX one of the best teams of 3D graphics engineers on the planet." They demonstrated their first integrated graphics chipset with a built-in geometry engine at

COMDEX COMDEX (an abbreviation of COMputer Dealers' EXhibition) was a computer expo trade show held in the Las Vegas Valley of Nevada, United States, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, usually ...

in the fall of 1999. It was built into the Aladdin 7 northbridge sold by

ALi ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib ( ar, عَلِيّ بْن أَبِي طَالِب; 600 – 661 CE) was the last of four Rightly Guided Caliphs to rule Islam (r. 656 – 661) immediately after the death of Muhammad, and he was the first Shia Imam. ...

of Taiwan. ArtX was acquired by

ATI Technologies ATI Technologies Inc. (commonly called ATI) was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technology Inc., ...

, Inc. in February 2000 for $400 million in stock options. An ATI spokesperson said, "ATI now becomes a major supplier to the game console market via Nintendo. The Dolphin platform is reputed to be king of the hill in terms of graphics and video performance with 128-bit architecture." ArtX paved the way for the development of ATI's

R300 The R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and developed by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU used in ''Radeon'' graphics cards. This GPU features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, a major improvement in featur ...

graphics processor (Radeon 9700) released in 2002 which formed the basis of ATI's consumer and professional products for three years afterward.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Artx American companies established in 1997 American companies disestablished in 2000 Computer companies established in 1997 Computer companies disestablished in 2000 Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Graphics hardware companies