Talk:Comparison of ATI graphics processing units

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Contents 1 CPUs 2 PEG v. PCIe x16 3 Radeon 9500 non-pro 4 DirextX Support 5 ATI Radeon X1400 6 TMUs 7 VPUs 8 Complete R100 section 9 Fab process 10 Radeon Mobility Updates (x1900) 11 Xpress 1100 and 1150 VPU 12 Missing cards and parenthetical notation in fillrate 13 X2K series is upside down 14 ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 missing? 15 Discussion moved from Top of Page 16 Style 17 Console Graphics Processors 18 HD 3870 X2 19 Original Research for R700 section 20 OpenGL 2.1 version note is misleading 21 Core Config

[edit] CPUs

What happened to the pages Comparison of Intel Central Processing Units and Comparison of AMD Central Processing Units? I can't believe that I have to use answers.com instead of WP.

• They were deleted in favor the more detailed lists that are now seperate into processor categories we now have "List of Pentium 4 Processors, List of Pentium D Processors etc etc.

[edit] PEG v. PCIe x16

It is my understanding that PEG is proper usage for the PCI Express Graphics slot (functionally different than simply a PCIe x16 slot). Is this accurate? If so, should this be changed in this article, and all other articles (nVidia GPU's etc.)? Sahrin 16:49, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

--
"PEG" is an improper term, "PCI Express x16" is simple a standard PCI Express Bus with 16 lanes; it can be used for any peripheral. High-end Graphic Cards can take advantage of it's bandwidth and architecture, more than any other device.--Satsuki 18:02, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

• PCI-SIG website uses PEG to denote graphics usage of an x8 slot used for graphics processors. The reason I propose using PEG in the place of PCIe x16 is because the slot is physically an x8 slot and electrically an anything between x1 and x16 (someday x32) slot. PEG clarifies it as a PCIe x8 slot for graphics. If anything, using your definition we should use PCIe x8, but I think that is also a misnomer (as typically the end user envisions it as an x16 slot, because electrically that is what it is). Again, I suggest we change PCIe x16 references to PEG for clarity or robustness of the information. Sahrin 01:33, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

• • PEG Link Mode, read. I think using "PEG" would confuse everyone. "PEG Link Mode" is a term used for overclocking the video card on specific mobos, which isn't standard. "PCI-e x16" is the correct and standard term for the interface these cards use.

• • • PCI-e x16 is the correct name for a physical and electrical x16 slot, which not all of these graphics cards use (either on the "slot" end or on the "connector" end). Saying PCIe x16 is akin to saying "USB 2.0" for every single USB device in existence - when in fact, not every USB device is 2.0 standard. PEG describes graphic use of PCI-Express, PCIe x16 describes a standard for a connector - for any purpose. Not saying I disagree we should use PCIe x16, but I think your justification is invalid. Sahrin 13:40, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Radeon 9500 non-pro

Radeon 9500 non-pro in its early life had 256 bit memory bus as it has been built on the same PCB that radeon 9700 was build. It has been posible to enable the extended memory bus with some moding and driver editing.

[edit] DirextX Support

Why my ATI 9000 64mb supports directx 9.0, while in the article it isn't so? (unsigned comment by User:87.0.236.9)

It supports DirectX 9.0 compatibility, but its feature-set matches only those from Direct3D 8.1. Read the "DirectX version note" section --200.148.44.7 01:56, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] ATI Radeon X1400

Why is there no Radeon X1400 on the list? Where does it fit in?

I don't think there is a Radeon X1400, other than the Mobility. Decembermouse (talk) 05:15, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] TMUs

Every single card on the page is listed as only having one TMU but many if not all of the cards have more than one TMU. Somebody needs to fix this. Some guy 08:00, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

• This is because it is supposed to be labeled TMU/Pipe, not just TMU alone.Coldpower27 04:32, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

• Indeed, for some reason, the table lists that one entry according to the old "pipeline" idea, where it first lists the number of "rendering pipelines," then the number of TMUs per pipeline, and then the number of Vertex Shaders/T&L units. This has really been an outdated layout of things, since "pipelines" are no longer followed. In this case, it results in some ackward usage of things like pipelines: 16(48) to try to get across that a card has 16 ROPs, 16 TMUs, and 48 PSs. Perhaps it would be recommended for someone to fix it; I may take care of it if I get the time. It really should have multiple entries to reflect each type of unit. Nottheking 23:02, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] VPUs

For consistency, I've listed any GPU having FF T&L unit as 0.5 vpu, regardless of the number of actual T&L units.

[edit] Complete R100 section

Could someone fill in the information for the remaining R100 skus: Radeon DDR, SDR 7200 Downgraded to OpenGL 1.3 due to lack of programmability extensions

[edit] Fab process

Fabrication Process - Average feature size of components of the processor.

I thought it was minimum feature size. Tempshill 20:15, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

• No, it's not. The actual transistors are smaller than the fabrication process listed, and some of the interconnects are even thinner still. Marking it by the minimum feature size would be too confusing, and hence "average" has been what it's always been defined as, in any sort of publication. Nottheking 00:00, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Affirm Nottheking. Average feature size is used because some features are much larger than the process used, others are much smaller. Minimum feature size would cover < 1% of all features on the process, average accounts for a much larger number of the features, in addition to being a number reflective of the size of all features, not just the ones at size X. Sahrin 01:30, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Radeon Mobility Updates (x1900)

Fujitsu Siemen (EU Division) is releasing a laptop(AMILO Xi 1554) with a Radeon Mobility x1900 256Mb XT/XTX. Not much information has been released. Updates for the ATi video card list needed soon. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=29358, http://laptoplogic.com/forums/showthread.php?p=17759, http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/home/products/notebooks/amilo_xi_1554.html. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by SatsukiMikata (talk • contribs) 16:07, 22 December 2006 (UTC).

[edit] Xpress 1100 and 1150 VPU

Is there a source that says that the 1100 and 1150 igps have dedicated vertex units? or is it host based as the 200m series? Everything I've read seems to suggest it's basically a smaller process of the RS482 with support for AM2

[edit] Missing cards and parenthetical notation in fillrate

It seems like this table is missing X1050 and X1550 cards. Or are these a rebranding of other ones?

Also, for some cards a second value is listed in parenthesis in the fillrate column, higher than the other value. (e.g. "2000 (6000)") What does this mean? Any help is appreciated. Sir Fastolfe 02:28, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] X2K series is upside down

All the other series run from low-end -> high-end, while the X2K series runs from high-end -> low-end. Is there any reason for this or should it be fixed? Pik d 23:02, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

• Since it's been about a month and no one gave any reasons for it to not be fixed, I went ahead and edited this. Pik d 18:51, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] ATI Radeon Mobility 9200 missing?

It seems that at least one model is missing here - mobility 9200. http://ati.amd.com/products/MobilityRadeon9200/index.html

[edit] Discussion moved from Top of Page

ATi is the correct capitalisation, and not ATI. Should this be changed?

• It would appear that both capitalisations are actually correct, or at least, that the all-capitals form is correct; while the ATi logo suggests that the last character is in lower-case format, all print/media writings of the name I've found capitalized all of the letters; thus, it could make sense to leave the name the same. Nottheking 23:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Could there be some other or more specific details of GPU processing elements than those pipes, TMU's and VPU's? Melter

• The four primary processing elements of a GPU are the ROPs (often now simply called "pipes,") TMUs, pixel shaders, and VPUs. There is also the memory controller(s), which are mentioned separately. Aside from that, there is little more on the GPU proper other than, perhaps, cache, but no readily availible documentation covers any other part of a GPU's structure other than that. However, the tables could perhaps use a form of listing components that provides more clarity, especially with the R500 and later designs, where the old design of a "pixel pipeline" was completely eliminated in favor of a less rigid, multi-threaded system. Nottheking 23:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

I can't believe the table doesn't show Shader Model support of individual chips... Terrible, that definitely needs to be added. -- xompanthy 01:32, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
You should be able to tell what Shader Model a graphics card supports by looking at the Direct X version of the product.

• As mentioned above, SM is more or less the same as DX version; the only exceptions are for various DX 8.0 versions, which don't apply to Radoen cards anyway. DX 8.1 is SM 1.4, DX 9.0 is SM 2.0, DX 9.0b is SM 2.0x, DX 9.0c is SM 3.0, and DX 10 is SM 4.0. Nottheking 23:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Someone had written that the X1600 Pro/XT only had 4 pixel pipelines, and 12 shader units. This is incorrect. The card has 12 pixel pipelines and 12 shader units. I have changed the information for these cards accordingly.

• Actually, neither are correct; the RV530, like all R500-series parts, has ZERO pixel pipelines; rather, it instead uses a threaded task system, using an arbiter processor on the GPU to distribute the workload across individual units, rather than relying on a pipeline structure that tied a pixel shader and one or more TMUs to a single ROP. Hence, I've edited the whole collumn to reflect this. Nottheking 23:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
  • Good catch nottheking. This was a mistake on my part when I re-aligned the columns for the R500/R600/Mobility Radeon parts. Thank you for correcting my error. Sahrin 01:35, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

There is some missing info. The RV351 was an improved RV350 with lower power consumption, less heat (and a die shrink?). It appears on the Mac as the 9650 (sometimes 9650 XT) and has 256Mb of RAM. There are also PC 9600s using the RV351. And there is also a card called the ATi Rage 128 Ultra, which comes in 16MiB and 32MiB versions, and as low profile. It appears to be a Rage 128 Pro with faster clocks... Anonymous Coward 04:04 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this page, it's very useful to me! Chris D'Amato 20:22, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Bandwidth is calculated incorrectly. I've changed it to use GB/s, where GB/s=10^9 bytes/second. To properly calculate bandwidth in GiB/s it's (bus width * effective clock of memory) / 1073741824 (bytes/GiB) / 8 (bits / byte)

Continous lists, divided in AGP and PCI-e categories, are becoming obscenely long. Should this article be modified as to be categorized by core families instead of native buses, as is Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units?

Just as a note, my most recent edit is implied by other comments I posted here; in a moment of absent-mindedness, I neglected to write a comment describing my edit to the R500 table, which amount to a re-writing of what was previously the "pipe x TMU x VPU" collumn. It is now the "ROP x TMU x PSU x VPU" collumn; it PROBABLY shouldn't use the letter "x" to separate each number, but that seemed consistent with the style there. Likewise, unlike the other three processing elements of a GPU, there is no article yet for a pixel-shader processing unit as of yet. I've chosen the acronym "PSU," which might be a bit confusing, so I'll leave it to others to decide if that's one to use. Nottheking 23:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Style

According to the Wikipedia manual of style, "Graphics Processing Units" in the title should be all lowercase.

[edit] Console Graphics Processors

I just noticed that the Xenos(Xbox 360) has a fillrate listed as 16000 compared to 648 for the Flipper(GameCube) and 972 for the Hollywood(Wii). This seems like a huge difference. Can anyone check the numbers on this? Daemonward 13:32, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

• Looking at the other GPUs, it appears that the fillrate should equal (Core Clock Max) * (Number of Texture Mapping Units). I'll do the calculations and make the appropriate changes. If I'm wrong, please correct me. Daemonward 14:37, 31 October 2007 (UTC)

• You would be correct, though that would be for the texture fill-rate. For the pixel fill-rate, it would be equal to (Core Clock Max) * (Pixels Per Clock Cycle), though that figure isn't included on the chart. The 648 mTexels/second is the correct figure for the Game Cube's Flipper, though the true number for the Wii's Hollywood is unknown, as both the design of the chip as well as its clock speed are unknown. (the figures used are stand-ins that have no cited source that dates after the console's release) The Xbox 360's Xenos was incorrect, as you noted, as it has 16 TMUs, and runs at 500MHz. Thank you for correcting that. Nottheking (talk) 04:11, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] HD 3870 X2

The new HD 3870 X2 are a bit confusing about they PCIe specifications, becouse it uses PCIe 2.0 (MSI R3870X2-T2D1G, MSI R3870X2-T2D1G-OC) for the card interface, but uses PCIe 1.1 (Tom's Hardware "ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 - Fastest Yet!" (page 4 of 20)) for the on-card Crossfire. - Placi1982 (talk) 12:39, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I have edited the specs on the 3870X2 to reflect Powercolor's upcoming release containing GDDR4. It should have 2 x 512mb GDDR4. Someone put 2 x 1024mb, if you know something about that please put it here! Decembermouse (talk) 05:19, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Original Research for R700 section

I don't know German, so I tried to Google translate the website cited in the section (here: http://www.hartware.de/news_44085.html) to English (for your convenience: here), it yields the following in the translated text:

We unfortunately have no way to verify this information, but [it is] interesting to read them in any case.

As mentioned, this information is not official and therefore with caution. Up to the expected introduction of HD ATI Radeon 4000 series in June, it is still for a while, so that the details can change anything.

An {{original research}} was put up. Please discuss. --202.40.157.145 (talk) 02:32, 18 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] OpenGL 2.1 version note is misleading

The OpenGL 2.1 version note here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ATI_Graphics_Processing_Units#OpenGL_version_note states that it supports GLSL and geometry shaders. This is misleading. Geometry shaders are not mentioned in the OpenGL 2.1 specification and are usually supported by vendor specific extensions. I think the WP entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opengl#Mt_Evans quite accurately explains when geometry shaders will be officially supported.

Maybe support for geometry shaders should be indicated separately by some different flag. 0meaning (talk) 08:23, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Core Config

Because several ATI graphics units do not have any hardware vertex processing capability at all, there needs to be a consistent method of differentiating on the table cards with software vertex capabilities (IGPs), fixed function vertex units (R100) and no vertex processing capabilities (Rage).