Radeon R520
Radeon X1K Series
Codename(s)	Fudo (R520) Rodin (R580)
Created in year	2005-2006
Entry-level cards	Radeon X1300, X1350
Mid-range cards	Radeon X1600, X1650
High-end cards	Radeon X1800, X1900, X1950
Direct3D support	9. Direct3D is part of Microsoft 's DirectX API. Direct3D is only available for Microsoft's various Windows Operating systems ( Windows 0c, Shader Model 3. 0
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ATI's "R520" core (codenamed Fudo) is the foundation for a line of DirectX 9. Microsoft DirectX is a collection of Application programming interfaces (APIs for handling tasks related to Multimedia, especially Game programming and 0c 3D accelerator X1000 video cards. A video card, also known as a graphics accelerator card, display adapter, or graphics card, is a hardware component whose function is to It is ATI's first major architectural overhaul since the "R300" core and is highly optimized for Shader Model 3. The Radeon R300 (introduced August 2002) is the third generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. A shader in the field of Computer graphics is a set of software instructions which is used by the graphic resources primarily to perform rendering effects 0. The Radeon X1000 series using the core was introduced on October 5, 2005. ATI Radeon is a brand of Graphics processing units (GPU that since 2000 has been manufactured by ATI Technologies and subsequently AMD and is Events 869 - The Fourth Council of Constantinople is convened to decide about what to do about Patriarch Photius of Constantinople Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. ATI has released the successor to the R500 series with the R600 series on May 14, 2007. The Graphics processing unit (GPU codenamed R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000/3000 series and the FireGL 2007 series Video Events 1264 - Battle of Lewes: Henry III of England is captured in France making Simon de Montfort the Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century.

Contents 1 Architecture 2 Variants 2.1 X1300 - X1550 series 2.2 X1600 series 2.3 X1650 series 2.4 X1800 series 2.5 X1900 and X1950 series 3 Chipset table 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Architecture

The R520 core architecture is referred to by ATI as an "Ultra Threaded Dispatch Processor". A thread in Computer science is short for a thread of execution. This refers to ATI's plan to boost the efficiency of their core, instead of going with a brute force increase in the number of processing units. A central pixel shader "dispatch unit" breaks shaders down into threads (batches) of 16 pixels (4x4) and can track and distribute up to 128 threads per pixel "quad" (4 pipelines each). A pixel shader is a shader program often executed on a Graphics processing unit. When one of the shader quads becomes idle, due to a completion of a task or waiting for other data, the dispatch engine will assign the quad with another task to do in the meantime, with the overall result being a greater utilization of the shader units, theoretically. With such a large number of threads per "quad", ATI created a very large general purpose register array that is capable of multiple concurrent reads and writes and has a high-bandwidth connection to each shader array. In Computer architecture, a processor register is a small amount of storage available on the CPU whose contents can be accessed more quickly than storage This provides temporary storage necessary to keep the pipelines fed by having work available as much as possible. With chips such as RV530 and R580, where the number of shader units per pipeline triples, the efficiency of pixel shading drops off slightly because these shaders still have the same level of threading resources as the less endowed RV515 and R520. ^[1]

The next major change to the core is with its memory bus. R420 and R300 had nearly identical memory controller designs, with the former being a bug fixed release designed for higher clock speeds. The Radeon R420 core from ATI Technologies was the company's basis for its 3rd-generation DirectX 9 R520, however, differs with its central controller (arbiter) that connects to the "memory clients". Around the chip there are two 256-bit ring buses running at the same speed as the DRAM chips, but in opposite directions to reduce latency. SDRAM latency refers to the delays incurred when a Computer tries to access Data in SDRAM. Along these ring buses are 4 "stop" points where data exits the ring and going into or out of the memory chips. There is actually a fifth stop, one that is significantly less complex, designed for the PCI Express interface and video input. Not to be confused with PCI-X, a different bus architecture Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, officially abbreviated as PCI-E This design allows memory accesses to be far quicker though lower latency by virtue of the smaller distance the signals need to move through the GPU, and by increasing the number of banks per DRAM. Basically the chip can spread out memory requests faster and more directly to the RAM chips. ATI claims a 40% improvement in efficiency over older designs. Again, the smaller cores such as RV515 and RV530 receive cutbacks due to their smaller, less costly designs. RV530, for example, has two internal 128-bit buses instead. This generation has support for all recent memory types, including GDDR4. GDDR4 SDRAM (Graphics Double Data Rate version 4 is a type of Graphics card memory specified by the JEDEC Semiconductor Memory Standard In addition to ring bus, each memory channel now has the granularity of 32-bits, which improves memory efficiency when performing small memory requests. ^[1]

The vertex shader engines were already of the required FP32 precision in ATI's older products. In Computing, floating point describes a system for numerical representation in which a string of digits (or Bits represents a Real number. Changes necessary for SM3. 0 included longer instruction lengths, dynamic flow control instructions, with branches, loops and subroutines and a larger temporary register space. The pixel shader engines are actually quite similar in computational layout to their R420 counterparts, although they were heavily optimized and tweaked to reach high clock speeds on the 90 nm process. ATI has been working for years on a high-performance shader compiler in their driver for their older hardware, so staying with a similar basic design that is compatible offered obvious cost and time savings. ^[1]

At the end of the pipeline, the texture addressing processors are now decoupled from pixel shader, so any unused texturing units can be dynamically allocated to pixels that need more texture layers. Other improvements include 4096x4096 texture support and ATI's 3Dc normal map compression sees an improvement in compression ratio for more specific situations. In 3D computer graphics, normal mapping is an application of the technique known as Bump mapping. ^[1]

The R5xx family introduced a more advanced onboard motion-video engine. Like the Radeon cards since the R100, the R5xx can offload almost the entire MPEG-1/2 video pipeline. The R5xx can also assist in Microsoft WMV9/VC-1 and MPEG H.264/AVC decoding, by a combination of the 3D/pipeline's shader-units and the motion-video engine. VC-1 is the informal name of the SMPTE 421M Video codec standard initially developed by Microsoft. H264 is a standard for Video compression. It is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10, or MPEG-4 AVC (for Advanced Video Coding) Benchmarks show only a modest decrease in CPU-utilization for VC-1 and H. 264 playback.

As is typical for an ATI video card release, a selection of real-time 3D demonstration programs were released at launch. ATI's development of their "digital superstar", Ruby, continued with a new demo named The Assassin. The demo showcased a highly-complex environment, with high dynamic range lighting (HDR) and dynamic soft shadows. High dynamic range rendering ( HDRR or HDR Rendering) also known as high dynamic range lighting, is the rendering of 3D Computer For other uses of the word "umbra" see Umbra (disambiguation. Ruby's latest nemesis, Cyn, was composed of 120,000 polygons. [1]

The cards support dual-link DVI output and HDCP. The Digital Visual Interface ( DVI) is a Video interface standard designed to maximize the visual quality of digital Display devices such as Flat panel High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection ( HDCP) is a form of digital Copy protection developed by Intel Corporation to prevent copying of digital audio However, using HDCP requires external ROM to be installed, which were not available for early models of the video cards. RV515, RV530, RV535 cores include 1 single and 1 double DVI link; R520, RV560, RV570, R580, R580+ cores include 2 double DVI links.

Variants

X1300 - X1550 series

This series is the budget solution of the X1000 series and is based on the RV515 core. The chips have 4 texture units, 4 ROPs, 4 pixel shaders, and 2 vertex shaders, similar to the older X300 - X600 cards. Texture mapping units (also known as graphical pipelines) is a component in a video card The Render Output Unit, often abbreviated as " ROP " and sometimes called (perhaps more properly Raster Operations Pipeline, is one of the final steps in A pixel shader is a shader program often executed on a Graphics processing unit. Vertex shader (abbreviation VS) is a shader program normally executed on the Graphics processing unit. The Radeon R300 (introduced August 2002) is the third generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. These chips basically use 1 "quad" (referring to 4 pipelines) of a R520, whereas the faster boards use just more of these "quads". For example, the X1800 uses 4 "quads". This modular design allows ATI to build a "top to bottom" line-up using identical technology, saving research and development time and money. Because of its smaller design, these cards also offer lower power demands (30 watts), so they run cooler and can be used in smaller cases. ^[1]

The Mobility Radeon X1300 to X1450 are based around this core as well. ^[2][3][4][5]

X1600 series

X1600 uses the M56^[2] core which is based on RV530 core, a core similar but distinct from RV515.

The RV530 has a 3:1 ratio of pixel shaders to texture units. It possesses 12 pixel shaders while retaining RV515's 4 texture units and 4 ROPs. It also gains one extra vertex shader, bringing the total to 5 units. The chip's single "quad" has 3 pixel shader processors per pipeline, similar to the design of R580's 4 quads. This means that RV530 has the same texturing ability as the X1300 at the same clock speed, but with its 12 pixel shaders it encroaches on X1800's territory in shader computational performance. Unfortunately it is a hypothesis purely as the X1600 lacks raw-power. ^[1]

The X1600 was positioned to replace Radeon X600 and Radeon X700 as ATI's mid-range GPU. The Radeon R300 (introduced August 2002) is the third generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. The Radeon R420 core from ATI Technologies was the company's basis for its 3rd-generation DirectX 9 NVIDIA 7600 GT over-shines it through its lifespan. The Mobility Radeon X1600 and X1700 are also based on RV530. ^[6][7]

X1650 series

The X1650 series has 2 parts, which are quite different with regards to performance. The X1650 Pro uses the RV535 core (which is a RV530 core manufactured on the newer 80 nm process). Its advantage over X1600 is both lower power consumption and heat output. ^[8]

The other part, the X1650XT, uses the newer RV570 core (also known as the RV560) although cut down in processing power (note that the fully-equipped RV570 core powers the X1950Pro, a high-performance card) to match its main competitor, NVIDIA's 7600GT. ^[9]

X1800 series

Originally the flagship of the X1000 series, the X1800 series was released with little fanfare due to the rolling release and the gain by its competitor at that time, NVIDIA’s GeForce 7 Series. The GeForce 7 Series is the seventh generation of Nvidia 's GeForce Graphics cards GeForce 7100 series The 7100 series was introduced The reason for the delayed release was that ATI engineers had found a bug within the core caused by a faulty 3rd party 90 nm chip design library which greatly hampered clock speed ramping, and so they had to "respin" it for another revision. The problem had been almost random in how it affected the prototype chips, making it quite difficult to finally identify. When the R520 hit the market in late 2005, the X1800 was the first high-end 90 nm GPU. ATI opted to fit the cards with either with 256 MiB or 512 MiB on-board memory (foreseeing a future of ever growing demands on local memory size). A mebibyte (a contraction of me ga bi nary byte) is a unit of Information or Computer storage, abbreviated MiB. The X1800XT PE was exclusively on 512 MiB on-board memory. The X1800 replaced the R480-based Radeon X850 as ATI's premier performance GPU. The Radeon R420 core from ATI Technologies was the company's basis for its 3rd-generation DirectX 9 ^[1]

With R520's delayed release, its competition was far more impressive than it would have been if the chip had made its originally scheduled Spring/Summer '05 release. Like its predecessor X850, the R420 chip carries 4 "quads" (4 pipelines each), which means it has similar texturing capability if at the same clock speed as its ancestor, and the NVIDIA 6800 series. Contrasting the X850 however, R520's shader units are vastly improved. Not only are they fully Shader Model 3 capable, but ATI introduced some innovative advancements in shader threading that can greatly improve the efficiency of the shader units. The High Level Shader Language or High Level Shading Language (HLSL is a proprietary Shading language developed by Microsoft for use with the Microsoft Unlike the X1900, the X1800 has 16 pixel shader processors as well, and equal ratio of texturing to pixel shading capability. The chip also ups the vertex shader number from 6 on X800 to 8. And, with the use of the 90 nm Low-K fabrication process, these high-transistor chips could still be clocked at very high frequencies. In Semiconductor manufacturing a Low-κ Dielectric is a material with a small Dielectric constant relative to silicon dioxide This is what gives the X1800 series the ability to be competitive with GPUs with more pipelines but lower clock speeds, such as the NVIDIA 7800 and 7900 series that use 24 pipelines. ^[1]

X1800 was quickly replaced by X1900 because of its delayed release. X1900 was not behind schedule, and was always planned as the "spring refresh" chip. However, due to the large quantity of unused X1800 chips, ATI decided to kill 1 quad of pixel pipelines and sell them off as the X1800GTO.

X1900 and X1950 series

The X1900 and X1950 series fixes several flaws in the X1800 design and adds a significant pixel shading performance boost. The R580 core is pin compatible with the R520 PCBs meaning that a redesign of the X1800 PCB was not needed. A printed circuit board, or PCB, is used to mechanically support and electrically connect Electronic components using conductive pathways or traces The boards carry either 256 MB or 512 MiB of onboard GDDR3 memory depending on the variant. GDDR3, Graphics Double Data Rate 3, is a graphics card-specific memory technology designed by ATI Technologies with the collaboration of JEDEC The primary change between R580 and R520 is that ATI changed the pixel shader processor to texture processor ratio. The X1900 cards have 3 pixel shaders on each pipeline instead of 1, giving a total of 48 pixel shader units. ATI has taken this step with the expectation that future 3D software will be more pixel shader intensive. ^[10]

In the latter half of 2006, ATI introduced the Radeon X1950 XTX. This is a graphics board using a revised R580 GPU called R580+. R580+ is the same as R580 except for support of GDDR4 memory, a new graphics DRAM technology that offers lower power consumption per clock and offers a significantly higher clock rate ceiling. GDDR4 SDRAM (Graphics Double Data Rate version 4 is a type of Graphics card memory specified by the JEDEC Semiconductor Memory Standard X1950 XTX clocks its RAM at 1 GHz (2 GHz DDR), providing 64. 0 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a 29% advantage over the X1900 XTX. The card was launched on August 23, 2006. ^[11]

The X1950 Pro was released on October 17 2006 and was intended to replace the X1900GT in the competitive sub-$200 market segment. The X1950 Pro GPU is built from the ground up on the 80 nm RV570 core with only 12 texture units and 36 pixel shaders. The X1950 Pro is the first ATI card that supports native Crossfire implementation by a pair of internal Crossfire connectors, which eliminates the need for the unwieldy external dongle found in older Crossfire systems. ^[12]

Chipset table

Main article: Comparison of ATI Graphics Processing Units

See also

• List of computer games that require Pixel Shaders

References

External links

• Graphic chip documentation

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