ArtX

ArtX was a company formed in 1997 by a group of engineers from Silicon Graphics, Inc. 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. David Orton, who was head of Silicon Graphics' advanced-graphics division, was appointed President of ArtX. They demonstrated their first integrated graphics chipset with a built-in geometry engine at COMDEX in the fall of 1999, which was marketed by Acer Lab of Taiwan. ArtX was contracted to create the graphics processor (called the Flipper chip) for Nintendo's fourth game console, the GameCube.

Soon afterward, it was acquired by ATI Technologies, Inc. in February 2000 for $400 million dollars in stock options. ArtX paved the way for the development of ATI's R300 graphics processor (Radeon 9700) released in 2002 which formed the basis of ATI's consumer and professional products for three years afterward.