ATI
ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.
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ATi Mach series
The ATi Mach line was a series of 2D graphics accelerators for personal computers developed by ATI Technologies. It became an extension (and eventual successor) to the ATI Wonder series of cards. The first chip in the series was the ATi Mach8. It was essentially a clone of the IBM 8514/A with a few notable extensions such as Crystal fonts. Being one of the first graphics accelerator chips on the market, the Mach8 did not have an integrated VGA core. In order to use the first Mach8 coprocessor cards, a separate VGA card was required. This made ownership considerably expensive. A temporary solution was presented with the ATi Graphics Ultra/Vantage cards, which combined an ATi 8514 Ultra and VGA Wonder+ into a single card (though using discrete ICs). The Mach32 chip was the follow-up to the Mach8, which finally featured an integrated VGA core, true colour support and a 64-bit datapath to internal memory.
Models
Mach 8
Released: 1990
- IBM 8514/A clone
- Support for up to 8-bit color modes
- Optional VGAWonder 2 (28800) graphics core (with dedicated 256–512 KB DRAM)
- 512 KB or 1 MB available with either DRAM or VRAM
- Port: ISA, MCA
The Mach 8 chip was used on the following ATI products:
- 8514 Ultra (VRAM, coprocessor only)
- 8514 Vantage (DRAM, coprocessor only)
- Graphics Vantage (DRAM)
- Graphics Ultra (VRAM)
- VGAWonder GT (Repackaged Graphics Ultra, 1 MB RAM standard)
Mach 32
Released: 1992
- 32-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
- Limited VESA VBE support
- Support for 15 bbp, 16 bbp and 24 bbp colour modes added
- Video memory: 1 or 2 MB DRAM or VRAM
- Memory interface: 64-bit
- Port: ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI, MCA
- Integrated VGA core
- 100% compatible with IBM 8514/A
The Mach 32 chip was used on the following ATI products:
- Graphics Wonder (DRAM)
- Graphics Ultra + (DRAM, fast RAMDAC)
- Graphics Ultra CLX (DRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
- Graphics Ultra Pro (VRAM)
- Graphics Ultra XLR (VRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
Mach 64
Released: 1994
- 64-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
- Limited VESA VBE support
- Video memory: 1, 2, 4 or 8 MB DRAM, VRAM, or SGRAM
- Memory interface: 64-bit
- Port: ISA, VLB, PCI
- Variants:
- "Mach64 CX/210888" - Original chipset, uncommon (up to 2 MB DRAM, or 4 MB VRAM)
- "Mach64 GX/210888GX" - Enhanced video playback capabilities
- "Mach64 ET/210888ET" - Embedded???
- "Mach64 CT/264CT - Cost-reduced Mach64 with integrated RAMDAC and clock chip (up to 2 MB DRAM)
- "Mach64 VT/264VT - AMC connector (Support for TV-tuner)
- "Mach64 GT/264GT 3D Rage" - 3D capabilities
- "Mach64 GT-B/264GT-B 3D Rage II - SDRAM & SGRAM support(up to 8 MB)
- "Mach64 LT/264LT" - Low-power mobile version of Mach64 GT
The Mach 64 chip was used on the following ATI products:
Mach64 GX Family:
- Graphics Xpression (1 or 2 MB DRAM)
- Graphics Pro Turbo (2 or 4 MB VRAM)
- WinTurbo (1 or 2 MB VRAM, non-upgradable)
- Graphics Pro Turbo 1600 (fast RAMDAC,PCI-only)
- XCLAIM GA (Macintosh)
Mach64 CT Family:
- WinBoost (1 MB DRAM, upgradable to 2mb)
- WinCharger (2 MB DRAM)
Mach64 VT Family:
- Video Charger
- Video Xpression (Mach64 VT2)
- Video Xpression+ (Mach64 VT4)
Mach64 GT Family:
- 3D Xpression (2 MB EDO DRAM))
Mach64 GT-B Family:
- 3D Charger (2 MB EDO DRAM)
- 3D XPRESSION+ (2 or 4 MB SDRAM)
- 3D XPRESSION+ PC2TV (TV-out)
- 3D Pro Turbo (2, 4, 6 or 8 MB SGRAM)
- 3D Pro Turbo+ PC2TV (TV-out)
- Xclaim VR - early versions (Macintosh, 2, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM, Video-In Video-Out)
- Xclaim 3D - early versions (Macintosh, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM)
- All-In-Wonder (SDRAM, TV Tuner)
Important Note: The 3D Rage and 3D Rage II chips were also known as Mach64 GT and Mach64 GT-B respectively. The Mach64 moniker was eliminated with introduction of the 3D Rage Pro.
Rage
3D Rage
3D Rage II
3D Rage Pro
Released in the latter half of 1997, the Rage Pro was a major improvement on ATI's previous Rage II chip. Improvements include an increased texture cache size (now at 4 KB) allowing for improved texture filtering, as well as an integrated triangle setup engine. It is the first ATI chip (and among the earliest graphics chips) to fully support AGP bus features, including execute mode (AGP texturing). It is also the first ATI chip to support OpenGL in hardware. However, like the previous Rage chips, the Rage Pro cannot bilinear filter alpha textures, resulting in transparent textures still having a rough appearance. Performance-wise, it is very similar to 3Dfx's original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The Rage Pro was very popular with OEMs and up until the late 2000s, it was integrated into many server motherboards.
The Rage Pro is also the last chip to support ATI's CIF application programming interface. It is also ATI's last chip with Windows 3.1x support.
Rage 128
Radeon
R100
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.
It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.
Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.
RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra and G400 Max.
RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM, and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of this card.
Notes:
- DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
R200
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz, typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.
A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it "Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid. Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[1]
Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.
ATi introduced a tessellation function called TruForm.
Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.
RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far off of Radeon 8500. Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.
Notes:
- DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
- With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.
R300
Introduced in August 2002, the R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9.0-compliant graphics chips. R300 introduced Shader Model 2.0 support and is also OpenGL 2.0-compliant. The R300 was designed by the ArtX engineering team that ATI had acquired in Feburary 2000. The same ArtX engineers (who were also former SGI employees) designed the Nintendo Gamecube GPU (Flipper) as well as the SGI RealityEngine-based graphics processor in the Nintendo 64. The first R300-based cards released were the Radeon 9500 and 9700 line of cards. In 2003, the Radeon 9600 and 9800 series were added to the lineup. R300 has many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than ATI's prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.
Anisotropic filtering quality is vastly improved in the R300, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work simultaneously with trilinear filtering. Furthermore, compared to its initial competitor, NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series, R300's anisotropic filtering incurred much less performance decrease. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.
The R300 enjoyed visual quality and performance supremacy over its competitors in games and applications that extensively used Shader Model 2.0. NVIDIA would not be able to match or exceed ATI's Direct3D 9.0 performance until the release of the GeForce 6 series in 2004.
Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. Also, despite being Direct3D 9.0-compliant, the R300 is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
Notes:
- With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.
R400
Introduced in 2004, this is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features - for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800 than 9800.
A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA. This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis, if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive anti-aliasing was added to the R400 series after the release of R500 series. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.
The ATI R400 series are ATI's last GPUs with official Windows 98/98 SE/ME support. Likewise with the R300 series, the R400 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
R500
Introduced in 2005, the Radeon X1000 / R500 series are ATI's first Direct3D 9.0c-compliant GPUs with full Shader Model 3.0 features. The R500 series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
