(Press Release) ATI Technologies Inc. has introduced the FIRE GL X1 workstation graphics board, based on the recently announced RADEON 9700 Visual Processing Unit. ATI's FIRE GL X1, scheduled to be available in October 2002, is the first in the world to deliver a fully programmable floating point architecture in OpenGL 2.0 and Microsoft DirectX 9, with double the performance of any product currently on the market. The FIRE GL X1 is also the first in the industry to offer eight parallel rendering pipelines - providing twice the rendering power of any competing product - giving digital content creators the ability to preview finished scenes in real time, saving days of production time. In addition, the FIRE GL X1 will offload complex data calculations from the CPU, therefore freeing up horsepower to accelerate the production pipeline.