The Technology in Brief:

     With the new generation of Radeon we must embrace a new series of technologies and improvements.  With a little help from ATI's website, I will try to briefly introduce each of them here.  Feel free to skip this page if you want to move on to the install or testing.

Features

• 321 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process
• Ultra-threaded architecture with fast dynamic branching
• Sixteen pixel shader processors
• Eight vertex shader processors
• 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
• Native PCI Express x16 bus interface
• Dynamic Voltage Control

     The Radeon X1000 series is the first Radeon product to feature a 90 nanometer die.  What this means is the graphics core is smaller and more efficient.  With a smaller die, ATI is able to do more in less space, allowing for more complicated graphics processors in a smaller area.  Smaller also means less heat is generated.  The power required to move data is greatly reduced but the smaller distances traveled.  Generating less heat also helps to allow core speeds to increase.  The X1800 series feature an incredible 321 million transistors and can handle up to 83 Gflops a second, up from about 66 Gflops on the X850 XT platinum.

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
• 3Dc+ texture compression
  • High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
  • High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
• Render to vertex buffer support
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
  • Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
  • New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
  • Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
  • Up to 128-tap texture filtering
  • Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

     The X1800 family uses Shader Model 3.0, HDR and adaptive anti-aliasing to provide a superior level of realism and take advantage of the increased speed.  This is one area where the X1000 series trumps the NVIDIA 7800 cards. ATI uses the new Shader model 3.0 to utilize Direct X 9c, this will likely be the last performance improvement here until Direct X 10 arrives.  Unlike the NVIDIA 7800 series, the X1000 series cards use two layers of Anisotropic Filtering bringing 64 bit High Dynamic Range (HDR) and add Adaptive Anti-Aliasing to improve shadows and transparent surfaces.  Although few programs take advantage of these new options, the future is bright for this emerging technology.

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic
• Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

     The Radeon X1800 family utilizes a unique a 512-bit ring bus memory controller. The ring uses two separated 256-bit data paths, running in opposite directions to carry data to the memory controller.   Similar to a networking ring topology, the result is a faster processing with a focus on higher demand situations such as 1600 x 1200 or higher gaming resolutions.

CrossFire™

• Multi-GPU technology
• Four modes of operation:
  • Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)
  • Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)
  • Scissor (compatibility)
  • Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

     At last the ATI Crossfire has arrived.  Designed to compete with the NVIDIA SLI architecture, ATI will utilize a new “supertiling” GPU sharing to divide graphics processing between two cards intelligently alternating the rendering workload to each Radeon GPU for efficient load balancing, and optimized performance.   The new Catalyst control center is used to setup and control the two cards for optimized performance.  Currently the Crossfire system requires a special Crossfire version of your graphics card to run two cards together.

Avivo™ Video and Display Platform

• High performance programmable video processor
  • Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding
  • DXVA support
  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  • Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion
  • Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  • 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion)
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• HDR tone mapping acceleration
  • Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output
• Flexible display support
  • Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
    • DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready
  • Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
  • 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output
  • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color)
  • Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display
  • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs
  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  • Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output
  • YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays
  • Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays
  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  • VGA mode support on all outputs
  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates
• Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550

     The X1000 series also come with ATI's VIVO technology built in.  VIVO connects your X1800 card with your high definition home theater system with the goal of seamless multimedia convergence.  Previously the VIVO technology was only available in the ATI 550 Theater cards, with the X1000 series ATI brings this powerful video capture and display to their core product line.  The result is a TIVO like functionality with unprecedented video quality and control.

     I hope I have helped to cover the new technologies correctly!  For more information on these technologies, take a look at the ATI X1800 support site here.