R600 (ASIC)

ATi Radeon HD 2000/3000 Series

Release date	2006-2007
Codename(s)	Radeon R600 series
Entry-level cards	2350, 2400 3430, 3450, 3470
Mid-range cards	2600 3650
High-end cards	2900 3830, 3850, 3870
Enthusiast cards	3850X2, 3870X2
Direct3D support	Direct3D 10.0 Shader Model 4.0 (HD 2000) Shader Model 4.1 (HD 3000)
OpenCL support	OpenCL 1.0
OpenGL support	OpenGL 3.3
Predecessor	Radeon X1000 Series
Successor	Radeon HD 4000 Series

The graphics processing unit (GPU) codenamed the Radeon R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series and the FireGL 2007 series video cards developed by ATI Technologies. The HD 2000 cards competed with nVidia's GeForce 8000 series, while the HD 3000 cards competed against the GeForce 9 series.

Architecture

Unified shaders

The R600 is the first personal computer graphics processing unit (GPU) from ATI based on a unified shader architecture. It is ATI's second generation unified shader design and is based on the Xenos GPU implemented in the Xbox 360 game console, which used the world's first such shader architecture. Previous GPU architectures implement separate processors for each type of graphics function. A unified architecture leverages many flexible processors which can be scheduled to process a variety of shader types, thereby significantly increasing GPU throughput (dependent on application instruction mix as noted below). The R600 core processes vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders as outlined by the Direct3D 10.0 specification for Shader Model 4.0 in addition to full OpenGL 3.0 support.^[1]

The new unified shader functionality is based upon a very long instruction word (VLIW) architecture in which the core executes operations in parallel.^[2]

A shader cluster is organized into 5 stream processing units. Each stream processing unit can retire a finished single precision floating point MAD (or ADD or MUL) instruction per clock, dot product (DP, and special cased by combining ALUs), and integer ADD.^[3] The 5th unit is more complex and can additionally handle special transcendental functions such as sine and cosine.^[3] Each shader cluster can execute 6 instructions per clock cycle (peak), consisting of 5 shading instructions plus 1 branch.^[3]

Notably, the VLIW architecture brings with it some classic challenges inherent to VLIW designs, namely that of maintaining optimal instruction flow.^[2] Additionally, the chip cannot co-issue instructions when one is dependent on the results of the other. Performance of the GPU is highly dependent on the mixture of instructions being used by the application and how well the real-time compiler in the driver can organize said instructions.^[3]

R600 core includes 64 shader clusters, while RV610 and RV630 cores have 8 and 24 shader clusters respectively.

Hardware tessellation

The GPU is equipped with an extra feature which is not part of the current DirectX 10.0 specification. It contains programmable tessellation units, similar to those within the Xenos GPU (codenamed C1) also developed by ATI. This unit allows a developer to take a simple polygon mesh and subdivide it based on a curved surface evaluation function, with different tessellation forms as Bézier surfaces with N-patches, B-splines and NURBS, and even some subdivision surface techniques, which usually comes with a displacement map texture.^[4] Essentially, this allows a simple, low-polygon model to be increased dramatically in polygon density in real-time with minimized performance loss. Scott Wasson of Tech Report noted during an AMD demo of the technology that the resulting model was so dense with millions of polygons that it appeared to be solid.^[2]

This unit is reminiscent of ATI's earlier TruForm technology, used initially in the Radeon 8500, which performed a similar function in hardware.^[5] While this tessellation hardware is not part of the current OpenGL or Direct3D requirements, and competitors such as the GeForce 8 series lack similar hardware, Microsoft has included Tessellation as part of their D3D10.1 future plans.^[6]

The TruForm technology from the past received little attention from software developers and was only utilized in a few game titles (such as Madden NFL 2004, Serious Sam, Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004, and unofficially Morrowind), because it was not a feature shared with NVIDIA GPUs which had a competing tessellation solution using Quintic-RT patches which met with even less support from developers.^[7] Since the Xenos contains similar hardware, and Microsoft sees hardware surface tessellation as a major GPU feature with proposed implementation of hardware tessellation support in future DirectX releases (presumably DirectX 11),^[4][6] dedicated hardware tessellation units may receive increased developer awareness in future titles. It remains to be seen whether ATI's implementation will be compatible with the eventual DirectX standard.

Ultra threaded dispatch processor

Although the R600 is a significant departure from previous designs, it still shares many features with its predecessors.^[2] The Ultra-Threaded Dispatch Processor is a major architectural component of the R600 core, just as it was with the Radeon X1000 GPUs. This processor manages a large number of in-flight threads of three distinct types (vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders) and switches amongst them as needed.^[2] With a large number of threads being managed simultaneously it is possible to reorganize thread order to optimally utilize the shaders. In other words, the dispatch processor evaluates what goes in the other parts of the R600 and attempts to keep processing efficiency as high as possible. There are lower levels of management as well; each SIMD array of 80 stream processors has its own sequencer and arbiter. The arbiter decides which thread to process next, while the sequencer attempts to reorder instructions for best possible performance within each thread.^[2]

Texturing and anti-aliasing

Texturing and final output aboard the R600 core is similar but also distinct from R580. R600 is equipped with 4 texture units that are decoupled (independent) from the shader core, like in the R520 and R580 GPUs.^[2]

The render output units (ROPs) of Radeon HD 2000 series now performs the task of Multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) with programmable sample grids and maximum of 8 sample points, instead of using pixel shaders as in Radeon X1000 series. Also new is the capability to filter FP16 textures, popular with HDR lighting, at full-speed. ROP can also perform trilinear and anisotropic filtering on all texture formats. On R600, this totals 16 pixels per clock for FP16 textures, while higher precision FP32 textures filter at half-speed (8 pixels per clock).^[2]

Anti-aliasing capabilities are more robust on R600 than on the R520 series. In addition to the ability to perform 8× MSAA, up from 6× MSAA on the R300 through R580, R600 has a new custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) mode. CFAA refers to an implementation of non-box filters that look at pixels around the particular pixel being processed in order to calculate the final color and anti-alias the image.^[3] CFAA is performed by shader, instead of in the ROPs. This brings greatly enhanced programmability because the filters can be customized, but may also bring potential performance issues because of the use of shader resources. As of launch of R600, CFAA utilizes wide and narrow tent filters. With these, samples from outside the pixel being processed are weighted linearly based upon their distance from the centroid of that pixel, with the linear function adjusted based on the wide or narrow filter chosen.^[3]

Memory controllers

Memory controllers are connected via internal bi-directional ring bus wrapped around the processor. In Radeon HD 2900, it is a 1,024-bit bi-directional ring bus (512-bit read and 512-bit write), with 8 64-bit memory channels for a total bus width of 512-bits on the 2900 XT.;^[2] in Radeon HD 3800, it is a 512-bit ring bus; in Radeon HD 2600 and HD 3600, it is a 256-bit ring bus; In Radeon HD 2400 and HD 3400, there is no ring bus.

Video processing, display and miscellaneous features

All video cards except the Radeon HD 2900 series include dedicated ATI's Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for hardware decoding of MPEG4, VC-1, and H.264 video streams, this capability being the major part of AVIVO HD technology. In terms of functionality, NVIDIA's Purevideo 2 offers similar hardware video acceleration, with UVD including greater VC-1 offloading.

HDTV encoding support is implemented via the integrated AMD Xilleon encoder; the companion Rage Theater chip used on the Radeon X1000 series was replaced with the digital Theater 200 chip, providing VIVO capabilities.

For display outputs, all variants include two dual-link TMDS transmitters, except for HD 2400 and HD 3400, which include one single and one dual-link TMDS transmitters. Each DVI output includes dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip decipher key. HDMI was introduced, supporting display resolutions up to 1,920×1,080, with integrated HD audio controller with 5.1-channel LPCM and AC3 encoding support. Audio is transmitted via DVI port, with specially designed DVI-to-HDMI dongle for HDMI output that carries both audio and video.^[8]

All variants support CrossFireX technology. CrossFire efficiency was improved and shows performance approaching the theoretical maximum of twice the performance of a single card.^[2][9]

While some of the architecture of Radeon HD 2000 family is similar to Xenos, Radeon HD 2000 family does not have embedded DRAM (eDRAM) frame buffer. Xenos' eDRAM is designed tightly around the limited resolutions at which the Xbox 360 operates. Personal computers operate at maximum efficiency at a much wider range of resolutions, which would require a significantly larger amount of eDRAM to be effective.

Half-generation update

The series saw a half-generation update with die shrink (55 nm) variants: RV670, RV635 and RV620. All variants support PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10.1 with Shader Model 4.1 features, dedicated ATI Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for all models ^[10] and PowerPlay technology for desktop video cards.^[11]

Except the Radeon HD 3800 series, all variants supported 2 integrated DisplayPort outputs, supporting 24- and 30-bit displays for resolutions up to 2,560×1,600. Each output included 1, 2, or 4 lanes per output, with data rate up to 2.7 Gbit/s per lane.

ATI claimed that the support of DirectX 10.1 can bring improved performance and processing efficiency with reduced rounding error (0.5 ULP compared with average error 1.0 ULP as tolerable error), better image details and quality, global illumination (a technique used in animated films, and more improvements to consumer gaming systems therefore giving more realistic gaming experience.^[12] )

Desktop products

The R600 family is called the Radeon HD 2000 series, with the enthusiast segment being the Radeon HD 2900 series which originally comprised the Radeon HD 2900 XT with GDDR3 memory released on May 14, and the higher-clocked GDDR4 version in early July.

The mainstream and budget segment products were the Radeon HD 2600 and Radeon HD 2400 series respectively, both launched June 28, 2007.^[13]

Previously there were no HD 2000 series products being offered in the performance segment while ATI used models from the previous generation to address that target market; the situation was not changed until the release of variants of the Radeon HD 2900 series, the Radeon HD 2900 Pro and GT, which filled the gap of the performance market for a short period of time.

Radeon HD 2400

The Radeon HD 2400 series was based on the codenamed RV610 GPU. It had 180 million transistors on a 65 nm fabrication process. The Radeon HD 2400 series used a 64-bit-wide memory bus.^[14] The die size is 85 mm².^[15] The official PCB design implements only a passive-cooling heatsink instead of a fan, and official claims of power consumption are as little as 35 W.^{[citation needed]} The core has 16 kiB unified vertex/texture cache away from dedicated vertex cache and L1/L2 texture cache used in higher end model.

Reports has that the first batch of the RV610 core (silicon revision A12), only being released to system builders, has a bug that hindered the UVD from working properly, but other parts of the die operated normally. Those products were officially supported with the release of Catalyst 7.10 driver, which the cards were named as Radeon HD 2350 series.^[16]

Several reports from owners of HD 2400 Pro suggest the card do not fully support hardware decoding for all H.264/VC-1 videos. The device driver, even with the latest stable version, seem to only honor hardware decoding for formats specified in the Blu-ray and HD-DVD specification. As a result such restriction, the card is deemed as not very useful for hardware video decoding since the majority of the H.264/VC-1 videos on the web are not encoded in those formats (even though the hardware itself is fully capable of doing such decoding work). This device driver restriction has led to the development of a third party driver patch, "DeusEx ATI HD Registry Tweak", to unlock the potential of HD 2400 Pro for full support of H.264/VC-1 hardware video decoding.^[17][18][19]

Radeon HD 2600

The Radeon HD 2600 series was based on the codenamed RV630 GPU and packed 390 million transistors on a 65 nm fabrication process. The Radeon HD 2600-series video cards included GDDR3 support, a 128-bit memory ring bus and 4-phase digital PWM,^[14] spanning a die size of 153 mm².^[20] Neither of the GDDR3 reference PCI-E designs required additional power connectors whereas the HD 2600 Pro and XT AGP variants required additional power through either 4-pin or 6-pin power connectors,^[21] Official claims state that the Radeon HD 2600 series consumes as little as 45 W of power.^{[citation needed]}

Radeon HD 2600 X2

The Radeon HD 2600 X2 is a dual-GPU product which includes 2 RV630 cores onto a single PCB with a PCI-E bridge splitting the PCI-E ×16 bandwidth into two groups of PCI-E ×8 lanes (each 2.0 Gbit/s). The card provides 4 DVI outputs or HDMI outputs via dongle and supports CrossFire configurations. AMD calls this product the Radeon HD 2600 X2 as seen by some vendors and as observed inside the INF file of Catalyst 7.9 version 8.411. Sapphire and other vendors including PowerColor and GeCube have either announced or demonstrated their respective dual GPU (connected by crossfire) products.^[22] Catalyst 7.9 added support for this hardware in September 2007. However, AMD did not provide much publicity to promote it. A vendor may offer cards containing 256 MiB, 512 MiB, or 1 GiB of video memory. Although the memory technology utilized is at a vendor's discretion, most vendors have opted for GDDR3 and DDR2 due to lower manufacturing cost and positioning of this product for the mainstream rather than performance market segment.

Radeon HD 2900

The Radeon HD 2900 series was based on the codenamed R600 GPU, packed 700 million transistors on an 80 nm fabrication process and had a 420 mm² die size.^[23] The Radeon HD 2900 XT was the first graphics card product to implement digital PWM on board, specifically 7-phase PWM, and was the first graphics card from ATI to support DirectX 10. It was also the first product of the R600 architecture and was launched on May 14, 2007.

The Radeon HD 2900 Pro was clocked lower at 600 MHz core and 800 MHz memory (1,600 MHz effective), configured with 512 MiB or 1 GiB (GDDR3/GDDR4) of video memory and the same 512-bit memory controller as the Radeon HD 2900 XT instead of the previously rumored 256-bit memory controller.^[24]

The Radeon HD 2900 GT was a 48-shader cluster variant clocked the same as the HD 2900 Pro with 256 MiB of video memory on a 256-bit interface.

Radeon HD 3800

The Radeon HD 3800 series was based on the codenamed RV670 GPU, packed 666 million transistors on a 55 nm fabrication process and had a die size at 192 mm²,^[25] with the same 64 shader clusters as the R600 core, but the memory bus width was reduced to 256 bits.

The RV670 GPU is also the base of the FireStream 9170 stream processor, which uses the GPU to perform general purpose floating-point calculations which were done in the CPU previously.

The Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 became available mid-November 2007.

Radeon HD 3690/3830

The Radeon HD 3690, which was limited only to the Chinese market where it was named HD 3830, has the same core as the Radeon 3800 series but with only a 128-bit memory controller and 256 MiB of GDDR3 memory. All other hardware specifications are retained.

A further announcement was made that there would be a Radeon HD 3830 variant bearing the same features as Radeon HD 3690, but with a unique device ID that does not allow add-in card partners in China to re-enable the burnt-out portion of the GPU core for more memory bandwidth.^[26]

The Radeon HD 3690 was released early February 2008 for the Chinese market only.

Radeon HD 3800 X2

Radeon HD 3870 X2 (codenamed R680) was released on January 28, 2008, featuring 2 RV670 cores with a maximum of 1 GiB GDDR3 SDRAM, targeting the enthusiast market and replacing the Radeon HD 2900 XT. The processor achieved a peak single-precision floating point performance of 1.06 TFLOPS, being the world's first single-PCB graphics product breaking the 1 TFLOP mark.^[27]

The Radeon HD 3870 X2 uses the same approach for communications between the two GPU cores as the Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro Dual and Radeon HD 2600 X2. The GPU cores communicate to each other through an onboard PCI-E switch,^[28] providing each core with ×8 (Radeon X1950 Pro Dual) to ×16 (Radeon HD 2600 X2) PCI-E bandwidth and becoming a software CrossFire setup, supporting two extra hardware CrossFire bridges. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 uses PEX8547 PCI-E switch,^[29] but each core shares ×16 PCI-E bandwidth. The card only sees one CrossFire bridge being placed onboard and between the cores, thus only allowing one CrossFire bridge to be plugged onto the card.^[30]

AMD stated the possibility of supporting 4 Radeon HD 3870 X2 cards, allowing 8 GPUs to be used on several motherboards, including the MSI K9A2 Platinum and Intel D5400XS, because these motherboards have sufficient spaces between PCI-E slots for dual-slot cooler video cards, presumably as a combination of two separate hardware CrossFire setups with a software CrossFire setup bridging the two, but currently with no driver support.^[31]

Radeon HD 3600

The Radeon HD 3600 series was based on the codenamed RV635 GPU, packed 378 million transistors on 55 nm fabrication process, and had 128-bit memory bus width. The support for HDMI and D-sub ports is also achieved through separate dongles. Beside the DisplayPort implementations, there also exists other display output layouts as dual DVI port or DVI with D-sub display output layout.

The only variant, the Radeon HD 3650, was released on January 23, 2008 and has also an AGP slot with 64-bit bus width or the standart PCI-E slot with 128-bit.

Radeon HD 3400

The Radeon HD 3400 series was based on the codenamed RV620 GPU, packed 181 million transistors on a 55 nm fabrication process, and had 64-bit memory bus width. Products were available in full height ATX cards and low-profile cards.^[32]

One of the notable features is that the Radeon HD 3400 series (including Mobility Radeon HD 3400 series) video cards support ATI Hybrid Graphics.^[33]

The Radeon HD 3450 and Radeon HD 3470 were released on January 23, 2008.

Mobile products

All Mobility Radeon HD 2000/3000 series share the same feature set support as their desktop counterparts, as well as the addition of the battery-conserving PowerPlay 7.0 features, which are augmented from the previous generation's PowerPlay 6.0.

The Mobility Radeon HD 2300 is a budget product which includes UVD in silica but lacks unified shader architecture and DirectX 10.0/SM 4.0 support, limiting support to DirectX 9.0c/SM 3.0 using the more traditional architecture of the previous generation. A high-end variant, the Mobility Radeon HD 2700, with higher core and memory frequencies than the Mobility Radeon HD 2600, was released in mid-December 2007.

The Mobility Radeon HD 2400 is offered in two model variants; the standard HD 2400 and the HD 2400 XT.^[34]

The Mobility Radeon HD 2600 is also available in the same two flavors; the plain HD 2600 and, at the top of the mobility lineup, the HD 2600 XT.^[35]

The half-generation update treatment had also applied to mobile products. Announced prior to CES 2008 was the Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series. Released in the first quarter of 2008, the Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series consisted of two families, the Mobility Radeon HD 3400 series and the Mobility Radeon HD 3600 series. The Mobility Radeon HD 3600 series also featured the industry's first implementation of on-board 128-bit GDDR4 memory.

About the time of late March to early April, 2008, AMD renewed the device ID list on its website ^[36] with the inclusion of Mobility Radeon HD 3850 X2 and Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2 and their respective device IDs. Later in Spring IDF 2008 held in Shanghai, a development board of the Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2 was demonstrated alongside a Centrino 2 platform demonstration system.^[37] The Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2 was based on two M88 GPUs with the addition of a PCI Express switch chip on a single PCB. The demonstrated development board is on PCI Express 2.0 ×16 bus, while the final product is expected to be on AXIOM/MXM modules.

Driver support

Windows

The Purple Pill tool issue, which could allow unsigned drivers to be loaded into Windows Vista and tamper with the operating system kernel,^[38] was resolved in the Catalyst 7.8 release (version 8.401).^[39] The AVIVO video converter for Windows Vista, and color temperature control in Catalyst Control Center was added with the release of Catalyst 7.9, package version 8.411. Software CrossFire was enabled for HD 2600 and HD 2400 series video cards with the release of Catalyst 7.10 (package version 8.421)

The Catalyst 8.1, package version 8.451, supports for MultiView technology for accelerated OpenGL rendering on multiple video card setup (CrossFire). The driver also allows CrossFire configurations for Radeon HD 3850 and HD 3870 video cards.^[40][41]

The Catalyst 8.3 is described by AMD as a milestone release,^[42] supporting DirectX 10.1, ATI CrossFire X technology and allowing the mixing of different Radeon HD 3800 series video cards to form a CrossFire X setup with 2 to 4 GPUs. Catalyst 8.3 introduced to new video controls to further enhance the video playback quality, these controls includes edge enhancement and noise reduction settings. There is also the support for extended desktop in CrossFire X mode. The anti-aliasing support for Unreal Engine 3.0 in DirectX 9.0 games, support for CFAA filters (wide tent and box tent) to be enabled when Super AA is enabled, and other features as developer support for hardware surface tessellation, hardware accelerated wide aspect ratio LCD scaling, HydraVision support for Windows Vista allowing to add maximum 9 virtual desktops and new Folding@home client are also officially supported in this release.

The Catalyst 8.5, package version 8.493^[43] brought new features include component video with 480i and 480p resolutions, SECAM TV output support, 1080p HDTV custom mode via HDMI, 1080p24 (1080p resolution at 24 Hz) support, HDMI Audio for non-standard TV modes (CEA 861b), support for adaptive anti-aliasing (and later, in Catalyst 8.6, also support for custom filters ^[44]) under OpenGL, Windows XP SP3 support and un-install utility enhancements. The driver also includes performance improvements and fixes some instability issues and rendering issues on some games.

Current Catalyst drivers do not support the AGP versions of Radeon HD 2000/3000 series cards with RIALTO bridge. Installing Catalyst drivers on those cards will yield the following error message: "setup did not find a driver compatible with your current hardware or operating system." or simply fail outright. The AGP cards in question are supported unofficially by ATI/AMD with a hot-fixed Catalyst driver-set each month since May 2008 with the Catalyst 8.5 hotfix.^[45] Their PCI vendor IDs are listed below:^[46]

GPU core	Product	PCI device ID
RV610	Radeon HD 2400 Pro	94C4
RV620 (M82SE)	Radeon HD 3430	95C2
RV620	Radeon HD 3450	95C6
RV630	Radeon HD 2600 Pro	9587
RV630	Radeon HD 2600 XT	9586

Linux

The official proprietary ATI Linux driver was named fglrx, then renamed as Catalyst for Linux. In the past there was no support for the AGP versions of the HD 2400 and HD 2600, but support was added in version 8.5 of fglrx.^[47]

Another Linux driver is the Radeon driver, an open-source AMD display driver, it is developed in part by specifications that AMD has openly published. To date, AMD has released register specifications for M56, M76, RV630 and RS690 GPUs and 3D programming guide for the R500 family of GPUs.^[48] AMD has committed to releasing their R500 and R600 GPU documentation along with publishing their specifications for past generations of GPUs.^[49]

Documentation release

AMD committed to releasing register documentations for each generations of GPU to support the open source community and an open source driver – Radeon for Linux(xf86-video-ati). Initial register documentation and parser code to execute the AtomBIOS ROM routines were released in September 2007. The R600 family Instruction Set Architecture guide was released on June 11, 2008.^[50] Sample code and register headers for the R600 and R700 3D engines were released in December 2008. AMD released the specifications for both the r6xx and r7xx families on January 26, 2009.^[51]

Marketing

New model numbering scheme

The numbering schemes for Radeon HD 3000 series as well as Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series were notably changed. While previous PRO, XT, GT, and XTX suffixes were eliminated, products were 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).^[52] While for dual-GPU products, a new suffix X2 will be used to identify its nature as dual-GPU on one PCB solution. 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 Dual GPU	800 X2–990 X23	>$250	200%	GDDR3, GDDR4	2× 256-bit	512/1,024	2 DVI, HDMI, DP (dongle)	HD 3870 X2/HD 3850 X2
High-end	800–990	>$150	75–100%	GDDR3, GDDR4	256-bit	256/512/1,024	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 3650/3690
							DVI, 2 DP, HDMI (dongle)
Mid-range	350–590	<$99	25–50%	DDR2, GDDR3	64-bit	64/128 (HM: 768/1,024)	D-sub, DVI, HDMI, DP (dongle)	HD 3450/3470
IGP	000–300	N/A	25–50%	UMA, side-port memory (GDDR2/GDDR3)	UMA, 32-bit (side-port)4	64/1284, UMA (OS dependent)	D-sub, DVI, HDMI, DP Component (YCbCr)	X1270/X1250/X1200 HD4290 HD4200/HD3300/HD3200/HD3100/HD2100

• ^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,^[25] while 90 appeared once in the lineup and can be seen as the XTX variant.
• ^2 Stream Processors only applicable to Direct3D 10-class video components (Radeon HD 2000/3000 series).
• ^3 All Dual-GPU solutions will have an X2 suffix after the model number.
• ^4 Side-port memory as local frame buffer is only available on selected IGP models, not all IGP models have this feature.

Product confusions

When Radeon HD 2900 was first released, there was much confusion as to whether or not the product included dedicated video processor hardware, due in part to statements that it supported the software program AVIVO HD. Many reviewers and subsequent readers/consumers interpreted this as meaning the HD 2900 incorporated the same UVD hardware as found in the HD 2400 and HD 2600 series, despite some sites noting this difference at launch time,^[53] weeks before the issue first gained traction as a result of a TechReport article.^[54] This confusion and subsequent discussions prompted AMD to make a formal statement designed to clarify exactly what UVD was available in which models.^[55][56] The HD 2900 XT video playback capabilities are similar to those of the previous X1000 cards with AVIVO capabilities.

It should be noted that several products, branded the Mobility Radeon X2000 series, are in fact based on the older R520 architecture and spotting the support of DirectX 9.0c only and do not have UVD on die.

Chipset table

See also

• Video card
• Graphics processing unit
• GeForce 8 series
• FireStream 9170, the GPGPU version of Radeon HD 3870 graphics card

References

External links

• ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series
• ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2000 Series
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 Series

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