At launch, the card's performance was below expectations and it had numerous software flaws that caused problems with games.
Radeon 8500's biggest disappointment was its early driver releases. (up to 6 texture sampling, 8 texture addressing, 8 color blending)ġ3 address operations, 8 color operations (up to 4 texture sampling, 8 color blending) As a result of very limited adoption, ATI dropped TruForm support from its future hardware. The technology requires developer support and is not practical for all scenarios. higher order surfaces), called Truform, which can automatically increase the geometric complexity of 3D models. R200 has ATI's first implementation of a hardware-accelerated tessellation engine (a.k.a. NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series offered a more accurate anisotropic implementation, but with a greater performance impact. However, it is still highly angle-dependent and the driver sometimes forces bilinear filtering for speed. For anisotropic filtering, Radeon 8500 uses a technique similar to that used in R100, but improved with trilinear filtering and some other refinements. The texture filtering capabilities of R200 are also improved over its predecessor. Increasing the number of textures accessed per pass reduces the number of times the card is forced into multi-pass rendering. The chip achieves this by using a method known as 'loop-back'. Each pipeline can now address a total of 6 texture layers per pass. The "texcrd" instruction moves the texture coordinate values of a texture into the destination register, while the "texld" instruction will load the texture at the coordinates specified in the source register to the destination register.Ĭompared to R100's 2x3 pixel pipeline architecture, R200's 4x2 design is more robust despite losing one texture unit per pipeline. This allows not only more complicated effects, but can also provide a speed boost by utilizing the hardware more efficiently. The phase instruction allows a shader program to operate on two separate "phases" (2 passes through the hardware), effectively doubling the maximum number of texture addressing and arithmetic instructions, and potentially allowing the number of passes required for an effect to be reduced. Notable instructions include "phase", "texcrd", and "texld". R200 introduced pixel shader version 1.4 (PS1.4), a significant enhancement to prior PS1.x specifications. The GPU is capable of dual display output ( HydraVision) and is equipped with a video decoding engine ( Video Immersion II) with adaptive hardware deinterlacing, temporal filtering, motion compensation, and iDCT. R200 has advanced memory bandwidth saving and overdraw reduction hardware called HyperZ II that consists of occlusion culling (hierarchical Z), fast z-buffer clear, and z-buffer compression. It is ATI's first GPU with programmable pixel and vertex processors, called Pixel Tapestry II and compliant with Direct3D 8.1. It has 2 vertex shaders and a legacy Direct3D 7 TCL unit, marketed as Charisma Engine II. R200's 3D hardware consists of 4 pixel pipelines, each with 2 texture sampling units. 1 Pixel shaders : Vertex shaders : Texture mapping units : Render output units.All models include DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.4.All models are manufactured with a 150 nm fabrication process.Support in this table refers to the most current version. ^ a b DRM ( Direct Rendering Manager) is a component of the Linux kernel.^ More displays may be supported with native DisplayPort connections, or splitting the maximum resolution between multiple monitors with active converters.HDCP is mandatory for the output of certain audio formats, placing additional constraints on the multimedia setup. A compatible HDCP display is also needed for this. ^ a b To play protected video content, it also requires card, operating system, driver, and application support.
In Linux, there is no support on the part of drivers and / or community.
In Windows it works as a DirectShow filter in your player. ^ Video processing ASIC for video frame rate interpolation technique.^ a b c The UVD and VCE were replaced by the Video Core Next (VCN) ASIC in the Raven Ridge APU implementation of Vega.
^ OpenGL 4+ compliance requires supporting FP64 shaders and these are emulated on some TeraScale chips using 32-bit hardware.^ R300, R400 and R500 based cards do not fully comply with OpenGL 2+ as the hardware does not support all types of non-power of two (NPOT) textures.^ The Radeon 100 Series has programmable pixel shaders, but do not fully comply with DirectX 8 or Pixel Shader 1.0.(on Linux: 1.1 (no Image support) with Mesa 3D, 2.0 with AMD drivers or AMD ROCm)