Introduction

HD 2400 XT HD 2600 XT HD 2900 XT 8800 GTX 8800 Ultra Shader units 40 120 320 128 128 ROPs 4 x2 4 x2 16 x2 24 24 GPU RV610 RV630 R600 G80 G80 Transistors 180 M 390 M 700 M 681 M 681 M Memory Size 256 MB 256 MB 512 MB 768 MB 768 MB Memory Bus Width 64 bit 128 bit 512 bit 384 bit 384 bit Core Clock 700 MHz 800 MHz 742 MHz 575 MHz 612 MHz Memory Clock 800 MHz 1100 MHz 825 MHz 900 MHz 1080 MHz Price $99 $199 $399 $599 $829

Full Specifications

700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process

512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface

Fully distributed design with 1024-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes

Optimized for high performance HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering at high display resolutions

320 stream processing units

Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders

Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders

Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors

128-bit floating point precision for all operations

Command processor for reduced CPU overhead

Shader instruction and constant caches

Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle

Up to 128 textures per pixel

Fully associative multi-level texture cache design

DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression

High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)

Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs

Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer

Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear

Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)

Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)

8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support

Physics processing support

Shader Model 4.0

Geometry Shaders

Stream Output

Integer and Bitwise Operations

Alpha to Coverage

Constant Buffers

State Objects

Texture Arrays

High performance vertex cache

Programmable tessellation unit

Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification

Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)

Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality

Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling

Temporal anti-aliasing

Gamma correct

Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)

All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128taps per pixel)

128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering

Bicubic filtering

sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)

Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)

Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support

Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs

Integrated compositing engine

High performance dual channel interconnect

Two independent display controllers

Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display

Full 30-bit display processing

Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion

Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays

High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs

Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays

Fast, glitch-free mode switching

Hardware cursor

Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs

Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)

Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content

Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs

Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536

HDMI output support

Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080

Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution

Integrated Xilleon™ HDTV encoder

Provides high quality analog TV output (component/Svideo/ composite)

Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions

Underscan and overscan compensation

HD decode acceleration for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats

Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray playback

Motion compensation and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation)

HD video processing

Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing

De-blocking and noise reduction filtering

Edge enhancement

Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)

Bad edit correction

High fidelity gamma correction, color correction, color space conversion, and scaling

MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding

Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

VGA mode support on all display outputs

PCI Express x16 bus interface

OpenGL 2.0 support

ATI's new Radeon HD 2900 or "R600" is probably the most hyped (and delayed) product of 2006 and 2007. The card uses the brand-new R600 GPU which is the first ATI product that has been specifically designed for DirectX10 and Windows Vista.Here are all the specs at a glance, for further reference see our upcoming Radeon HD 2000 Series article.Ring Bus Memory ControllerUnified Superscalar Shader ArchitectureFull support for Microsoft DirectX 10.0Dynamic Geometry AccelerationAnti-aliasing featuresTexture filtering featuresCrossFire™ Multi-GPU TechnologyATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform