Radeon

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2007)
Radeon Graphics

The Radeon Graphics logo
Invented By: ATI

ATI Radeon is a brand of graphics processing units (GPU) that since 2000 has been manufactured by ATI Technologies and subsequently AMD and is the successor to their Rage line. There are four different groups, which can be differentiated by the DirectX generation they support. More specific distinctions can also be followed, such as the HyperZ version, the number of pixel pipelines, and of course, the memory and processor clock speeds.

Contents

[edit] ATI Radeon Processor Generations

Series Graphics APIs support Notes
DirectX OpenGL
R100 DirectX 7.0 OpenGL 1.3 Was ATI's first graphics processor to be fully DirectX 7 compliant. It was first introduced in 2000. R100 brought with it large gains in bandwidth and fill-rate efficiency through the new HyperZ technology. Initial models included Radeon SDR, DDR and 7000/VE. The final release was the Radeon 7500.
R200 DirectX 8.1 OpenGL 1.4 ATI's second generation Radeon. This design included ATI's first programmable shader architecture and introduced pixel shader 1.4, the most advanced shader model prior to 2.0. This line includes Radeon 8500 - 9200, 9250.
R300 DirectX 9.0 OpenGL 2.0 ATI's breakthrough DirectX 9.0 technology, released in 2002, made ATI the technology leader for several years with its industry-leading pixel shader 2.0 performance. Included in this generation are Radeon 9500 - 9800, X300 - X600, X1050.
R420 DirectX 9.0b While heavily based upon the previous generation, this line included extensions to the Shader Model 2 feature-set. Shader Model 2b, the specification ATI and Microsoft defined with this generation, offered somewhat more shader program flexibility. This generation's technology is used in Radeon X700 - X850.
R520 DirectX 9.0c ATI's DirectX 9.0c series of graphics cards, with complete Shader Model 3.0 support. Launched in October 2005, this series brought a number of enhancements including the floating point render target technology necessary for HDR rendering with anti-aliasing. Cards released include X1300 - X1950.
R600 DirectX 10.0/
DirectX 10.1 (RV670)		 AMD's first series of ATI Radeon GPUs supporting the Direct3D 10.0 specification and the company's second graphics solution to employ unified shader technology. Releases of this platform include the HD 2400, HD 2600 and HD 2900. There are also products supporting DirectX 10.1, known as the HD 3800 series, with a die shrink.
R700 DirectX 10.1 OpenGL 2.1 AMD/ATI's new series, based on the R600 architecture. Mostly a bolstered card with many more stream processors, with improvements to power consumption and GDDR5 support for the high-end RV770 chip. Expected to arrive in June of 2008.

[edit] Product naming scheme

Since ATI's first DirectX 9-class GPU, the company has followed a naming scheme that relates each product to a market segment.

  • 1 Stream Processors only applicable to Radeon HD 2000 series video cards.
Product Category Card Name
(* denotes wildcard)		 Usual Suffixes Price range (USD) Shader amount (VS/PS/SPU)1 Memory Outputs Example products
Type Width
(bit)		 Size (MiB)
Enthusiast/high-end **9**
**8**		 XTX, XT, XT PE, XL, Pro, GTO, GT >$150 75-100%
200% (X2, dual-GPU)		 GDDR3,
GDDR4		 256-bit/
512-bit		 256/512/1024 Dual DVI with
HDMI (HD 2000 dongle)		 X800, X1950, HD 2900
Mainstream **7**
**6**
**5**		 XT, XL, Pro, SE, GTO, GT $100-$150 37.5-75% DDR2,
GDDR3,
GDDR4		 128-bit 128/256/512 D-Sub, DVI/
Dual DVI with
HDMI (HD 2000 dongle)		 X700, X1600, HD 2600
Budget/Value **4**
**3**
**2**
**1**
**0**
7x00, 9000, 9200, 9250		 SE, HM <$99 25-50% DDR2,
GDDR3		 64-bit 64/128
(HM: 768/1024)		 D-Sub, DVI with
HDMI (HD 2000 Dongle)		 X300, X1050,
X1400, HD 2400

Note: Suffix indicate different layers of performance. See ATI Video Card Suffixes.

Since the release of the Radeon HD 3000 series products, previous PRO, XT, GT, and XTX suffixes were eliminated, products will be differentiated by changing the last two digits of the product model number (for instance, HD 3850 and HD 3870, giving the impression that the HD 3870 model having higher performance than HD 3850).[1] Similar changes to the IGP naming were spotted as well, for the previously launched AMD M690T chipset with side-port memory, the IGP is named "Radeon X1270", while for the AMD 690G chipset, the IGP is named "Radeon X1250", as for AMD 690V chipset, the IGP is clocked lower and having fewer functions and thus named "Radeon X1200". The new numbering scheme of video products are shown below:

Product Category Model number
range (steps of 10)1		 Price range
(USD)		 Shader amount
(VS/PS/SPU)2		 Memory Outputs Product(s)
Type Width
(bit)		 Size (MiB)
Enthusiast
/high-end		 800-990 >$150 75-100% GDDR3,
GDDR4		 256-bit 256/512 2 DVI,
HDMI, DP (Dongle)		 HD 3870/3850
Mainstream 600-790 $100-$150 37.5-75% DDR2,
GDDR3,
GDDR4		 128-bit 128/256/512 D-Sub, DVI
 HD 3650
DVI, 2 DP,
HDMI (Dongle)
Budget/Value 350-590 <$99 25-50% DDR2,
GDDR3		 64-bit 64/128
(HM: 768/1024)		 D-Sub, DVI,
HDMI, DP (Dongle)		 HD 3450/3470
IGP 000-300 N/A 25-50% UMA,
side-port memory
(GDDR2/GDDR3)		 UMA + 16-bit (side-port) 64 + UMA
(OS dependent)		 D-Sub, DVI,
HDMI, DP
Component (YCbCr)		 X1270/X1250/X1200
HD 3200/HD 3100/2100
  • 1 The last two digits denotes variant, similar to the previous suffixes, which "70" is in essence the "XT" variant while "50" is actually the "Pro" variant.[2]
  • 2 Stream Processors only applicable to Direct3D 10-class video components (Radeon HD 2000/3000 series).

[edit] Drivers

[edit] Windows

Main article: ATI Catalyst Drivers

The ATI Radeon graphics driver package for Windows operating system is called ATI Catalyst.

The ATI Catalyst official drivers don't work for the Mobility version of Radeon due to an agreement with the OEM vendors.[3] An alternative is an application called Modtool, a 3rd party utility which modifies recent desktop Radeon drivers to work with Mobility Radeon graphics cards.

There are also unofficial drivers available such as the Omega drivers or DNA drivers, claiming to boost performance when compared to the official Catalyst. These drivers typically consist of mixtures of various driver file versions with some registry variables altered and potentially offer superior performance or quality. They are, of course, unsupported, and as such are not guaranteed to function correctly or quantitatively improve functionality (placebo effect). Some of them also provide modified or patched DLL files for hardware enthusiasts to modify their cards (as 9500non-pro and 9500Pro use the same chips, and 9800SE and 9800 use the same chips, some of them can be modified by activating all 8 pixel pipelines).

[edit] Windows XP Professional x64

ATI has yet to produce mobile 64 bit drivers for the Windows XP Professional x64 Edition operating system. This may be due to a number of factors. One factor is that most people use the 32-bit version of Windows XP, due not only to video card driver issues, but other driver compatibility issues as well. Nonetheless, it is possible to obtain a proper driver for this type of setup. In order to do so, one requires the use of an unsupported application like Modtool.

[edit] Macintosh

ATI used to only offer driver updates for their retail Mac video cards, but now also offer drivers for all ATI Mac products, including the GPUs in Apple's portable lines. Apple also includes ATI driver updates whenever they release a new OS update. ATI provides a preference panel for use in Mac OS X called ATI Displays which can be used both with retail and OEM versions of their cards. Though it gives more control over advanced features of the graphics chipset, ATI Displays has limited functionality compared to their Catalyst for Windows product. As Microsoft does not license DirectX for other OS platforms, Mac OS X uses OpenGL exclusively, though in the past with OS 9, Apple used the now-defunct RAVE API.

[edit] Linux

Initially, ATI did not produce Radeon drivers for Linux, instead giving hardware specifications and documentation to Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) developers under various non-disclosure agreements. In mid 2004, however, ATI started to support Linux (XFree86, X.Org), hiring a new Linux driver team to produce fglrx. Their new proprietary Linux drivers, instead of being a port of the Catalyst drivers, were based on the Linux drivers for the FireGL (the FireGL drivers worked with Radeons before, but didn't officially support them), a card geared towards graphics producers, not gamers; though the display drivers part is now based on the same sources as the ones from Windows Catalyst since version 4.x in late 2004. The proprietary Linux drivers don't support the R100 chips (Radeon 7000-7500).

The frequency of driver updates increased in late 2004, releasing Linux drivers every 2 months, half as often as their Windows counterparts. Then since late 2005 this has been increased to monthly releases, inline with the Windows CATALYST releases. On 12 April 2006, ATI released binary drivers for the ATI R5x0 chips (x1300/x1600/x1800 cards), approximately six months after first releasing these cards.

However the ATI Linux graphics driver suffers from bad performance: 2D benchmarks show that ATI cards using these drivers are two orders of magnitude slower than competing cards in basic tasks.[4] More information about the problems can be found on the Fglrx driver page. As of the 8.25.18 proprietary Linux driver release R200 support is completely broken. There has been no comment from ATI on the problem.[5]

The efforts to provide free drivers for these cards continue, though. While the R100 and R200-series chipset drivers were written using specifications provided by ATI (r200 driver), the R300 and R400 series hardware acceleration was written through reverse engineering (r300 driver) the methods used by ATI's proprietary driver. The reverse-engineered code is now in X.Org and Mesa, bringing experimental support for some of the current Radeon cards.

All r3xx cards and all r4xx excluding the Xpress integrated chips should be supported by the new experimental r300 driver; as of June 2007, there is experimental support for the Xpress chips in the DRI and Mesa git repositories.

There are a number of unofficial community websites for bug tracking[6] and a wiki.[7]

[edit] FreeBSD

FreeBSD systems have the same open-source support for Radeon hardware as Linux, including 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300-series chipsets. The R300 support, as with Linux, remains experimental due to being reverse-engineered from ATI's proprietary drivers.

ATI does not support its proprietary fglrx driver on FreeBSD, it has been partly ported by a third party as of January 2007. This is in contrast to its main rival, NVIDIA, which has periodically released its proprietary driver for FreeBSD since November 2002. In the meantime the release is similar to Linux.

[edit] AmigaOS

Since AmigaOS 4 introduction AmigaOS users officially gained support for R100/R200 Radeon cards with the R300 chips being planned, although this depends on the available hardware documentations from ATI or the open source drivers from the Linux community.

[edit] BeOS

Although ATI does not provide its own drivers for BeOS, it provides hardware and technical documentation to the Haiku Project who provide drivers with full 2D and video in/out support. They are the sole graphics manufacturer in any way still supporting BeOS.

[edit] Open source drivers

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (June 2008)
This article or section needs to be updated.
Please update the article to reflect recent events / newly available information, and remove this template when finished.

On September 12, 2007, AMD released documentation for the RV630 (Radeon HD 2600 PRO and Radeon HD 2600 XT) and M56 (Radeon Mobility X1600) chips for open source driver development, for its strategic open source driver development initiative.[8] This initial "documentation drop" released sufficient programming information for a skeleton display detection and modesetting driver to be released. This was version 1.0.0 of the "radeonhd" driver. Further documentation releases and a baseline open source drivers are likely to follow in the near future. [9] The register reference guides for M76 (Mobility Radeon HD 2600/2700/3600/3800 series) and RS690 (AMD 690 chipset series) were also released on January 4, 2008, and is available from ATI website [10].

All specs are available without NDA. AMD collaborates with Novell to build new free driver (called RadeonHD) based on these specifications. The driver, as of September 2007, is very experimental. Its development can be tracked on git repository at Freedesktop.org website. [11]

[edit] Pulse-Width Modulation (fan control)

Unlike NVIDIA, ATI implements PWM (pulse-width modulation) on some of their newer graphics cards to control fan speeds. Some computer motherboards use this technology for fan control, as well. PWM is used to reduce the total amount of power delivered to a load without losses normally incurred when a power source is limited by resistive means. As the name of the technology says, PWM delivers power through pulses instead of resistance-based constant voltage. However, this can create a clicking sound on the video card when the fan is at certain speeds. Some users see this as hindering the ability to build a quiet computer system. In recent releases of products, digital PWM was used.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ RV670 is Radeon HD 3800 Series. VR-Zone (October 17, 2007).
  2. ^ (Spanish) MadboxPC thread, retrieved November 10, 2007
  3. ^ [1], retrieved March 10, 2008
  4. ^ http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=7#c24
  5. ^ http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=932a39244ec6fb5fa118d2ee3b246539&t=33856854
  6. ^ http://ati.cchtml.com/
  7. ^ http://wiki.cchtml.com/
  8. ^ AMD Press release, retrieved September 13, 2007
  9. ^ AMD Releases 900+ Pages Of GPU Specifications
  10. ^ AMD Open GPU documentations page, retrieved Feberuary 13, 2008
  11. ^ freedesktop.org git - xorg/driver/xf86-video-radeonhd/summary

[edit] External links

v • d • e
AMD graphics products (ATI)
   
ATI consumer graphics processors
2D rendering: Mach
Direct3D 3-6: Rage
Direct3D 7: Radeon R100
Direct3D 8: Radeon R200
Direct3D 9: Radeon R300 • R420 • R520
Direct3D 10: Radeon R600 • R700 • R800
Other ATI brand products
Multi-GPU: Multi-Rendering • CrossFire • ATI Hybrid Graphics
Workstations and HPC: FireGL • FireMV • FireStream (CTM)
Consumer electronics: All-in-Wonder • Imageon • Xilleon • UVD • AVIVO • XGP
Miscellaneous: Catalyst • HLSL2GLSL • HyperMemory • PowerPlay • TruForm
Game console GPU: Flipper (GameCube) • Xenos (Xbox 360) • Hollywood (Wii)