"ATI has been asleep at the wheel this last two years."
-- Omid Rahmat of Tom's Hardware, in a June 1st editorial entitled Perspective on ATI
"ATI claims a fill rate of one billion textured pixels per second. That translates to 62.5 million triangles processed per second, well over twice what the already-impressive Radeon card could deliver."
--insidemacgames.com
ATI released its long-awaited rebuttal to market leader nVIDIA's Geforce3 family of processors on Aug. 14th, 2001, with the official announcement of its new "R200" family of products, led by the flagship Radeon 8500. The company supplied us with detailed information about the new chip earlier this month, under strict non-disclosure terms. (So strict, in fact, that when PC Buyer's Guide mentioned knowledge of leaked information from sources such as those noted below, the company threatened to retract its offer for an interview.)
Considering that almost everybody though the new chip would be dubbed the Radeon 2, one of the first questions we asked ATI was "why 8500?" ATI says the name is a nod to DirectX 8.x, upon which several key R200 features are built.
At the heart of the Radeon 8500 is the new R200 chip itself. The 3D engine uses several techniques to optimize 3D performance. These include a vertex cache, pixel cache and texture cache, with four rendering pipelines. A pixel cache accelerates 2D display functions. The so-called Charisma Engine provides transform, clipping and lighting functions.
Perhaps the most exciting innovation is the inclusion of a technology ATI calls TRUFORM. Apparently based on a polygon-to-spline conversion algorithm, it allows 3D gaming characters -- even those designed without TRUFORM in mind -- to be rendered with more lifelike, NURBS-like, curves instead of blocky polygon edges.
The Radeon 8500, touted as "the ultimate gaming card," has 4ns DDR RAM and is clocked at 250 MHz. In a welcome change from the way it mishandled the media during the rollout of the original Radeon, in which some reviewers received cards clocked faster than consumers could buy, ATI apparently underclocked the early engineering samples it sent out to some testers. (This is not that uncommon, as early yields of experimental chips often can't run at full speed.) Thus, none of the prerelease reports listed at the end of this article correctly identified the memory speed as 275 MHz.
The new 128-bit R200 chip is based on a 0.15 micron fabrication process. Onboard, you'll find 64MB DDR RAM (4ns). The engineering specs for the R200 chip also allow for the use of lower-cost SDRAM so it is likely a lower-cost card, with correspondingly lower performance, will also be offered at some point, although ATI declined to comment on this.
ATI did, however, supply us with a few notable specs: the Radeon 8500's "HyperZ" Z-buffer is 8 times faster, the company says. The new R200 engine sports 4 rendering pipelines, with 6 texture units per pipe. For comparison, the Radeon had only 2 pipes; 3 texture units per pipe.)
Although graphics cards have, for some time, been pushing 2-D pixels at such high rates that further improvement is not a key priority, the R200 uses a pixel cache to optimally accelerate 2D display functions. Adaptive FSAA (full scene anti-aliasing) is onboard, too -- let's just hope ATI gets the FSAA drivers together a little more quickly than was the case with the Radeon. The company says the cards will ship with drivers for Win98/Me/Win2k and XP.
A number of rumour reports emerged before ATI's official embargo date of Aug. 14; remarkably, ATI managed to keep a lid on the product name -- the 8500 moniker, says the company, is a nod to its design as a DirectX 8.x engine -- and some of its key specs, which were not correctly cited in any of the prerelease reports we saw floating around the Web.
With that said, the detailed information available in early August from the Koream site Brainbox.co.kr was not far off. According to their reviewer, who claimed to have looked at an engineering sample, the high-end R200 model has 4ns DDR RAM, with a core clocked at 250. The new 128-bit R200 chip is based on a 0.15 micron fabrication process. Onboard, you'll find 64MB DDR RAM (4ns). The engineering specs for the R200 chip also allow for the use of lower-cost SDRAM so it is likely a lower-cost card, with correspondingly lower performance, will also be offered.
As usual, ATI is big on TV/video out functionality. The card sports DVI, VGA and TV-OUT (the latter, thanks to the venerable ATI Rage Theatre chip) and supports simultaneous display on dual displays via so-called "Hydra Vision" mode. A "Video Immersion II" circuit provides onboard HTDV/DVD decoding output, with scaling and YUV to RGB conversion. The interface is AGP 4x, with no word yet on any PCI variants.
If ATI follows its usual schedule, an R200 card with "All in Wonder" features will follow a few months later, with lower-cost models (some of which will provide video in/video out) supplied to OEMs at some point, too. Although the company declined to officially name any specific timetables, it says 8500 versions for All-in-Wonder and Macintosh markets are "in the works." Expect the Radeon 8500 to hit store shelves in mid-to-late Sept.
The company also announced a card called the Radeon 7500. It is based on the first-generation Radeon chip, plus the dual display capability of the Radeon VE, but uses the new R200's .15 micron fabrication process and memory controller. ATI also announced the first fruits of its new workstation partnership with FireGL, the FireGL 8800.
In part 2 of this feature, we take a closer look at ATI's driver quality and performance, including a fill rate of one billion textured pixels per second. As noted by insidemacgames.com, that translates to 62.5 million triangles processed per second, well over twice what the already-impressive Radeon card could deliver.
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