ATi Radeon R300 Series
ATi Radeon R300 Series
ATi Radeon R300 Series
R300 redirects here. For other uses, see R300 (disam- clock speed gain.
biguation). One major change with the manufacturing of the core was
the use of the ip-chip packaging, a technology not used
The R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and devel- previously on video cards. Flip chip packaging allows
oped by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU far better cooling of the die by ipping it and exposing
used in Radeon graphics cards. This GPU features 3D it directly to the cooling solution. ATI thus could achieve
acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, higher clock speeds. Radeon 9700 PRO was launched
a major improvement in features and performance com- clocked at 325 MHz, ahead of the originally projected
pared to the preceding R200 design. R300 was the rst 300 MHz. With a transistor count of 110 million, it was
fully Direct3D 9-capable consumer graphics chip. The the largest and most complex GPU of the time. A slower
processors also include 2D GUI acceleration, video ac- chip, the 9700, was launched a few months later, dier-
celeration, and multiple display outputs. ing only by lower core and memory speeds. Despite that,
The rst graphics cards using the R300 to be released the Radeon 9700 PRO was clocked signicantly higher
were the Radeon 9700. It was the rst time that ATI than the Matrox Parhelia 512, a card released but months
marketed its GPU as a Visual Processing Unit (VPU). before R300 and considered to be the pinnacle of graph-
R300 and its derivatives would form the basis for ATIs ics chip manufacturing (with 80 million transistors at 220
consumer and professional product lines for over 3 years. MHz), up until R300s arrival.
The integrated graphics processor based upon R300 is the
Xpress 200. 1.1 Architecture
1
2 1 DEVELOPMENT
512 several months earlier, but this board did not show
great gains with its 256-bit bus. ATI, however, had not
only doubled their bus to 256-bit, but also integrated an
advanced crossbar memory controller, somewhat simi-
lar to NVIDIA's memory technology. Utilizing four in-
dividual load-balanced 64-bit memory controllers, ATIs
memory implementation was quite capable of achieving
high bandwidth eciency by maintaining adequate gran-
ularity of memory transactions and thus working around
memory latency limitations. R300 was also given the
latest renement of ATIs innovative HyperZ memory
bandwidth and llrate saving technology, HyperZ III. The
demands of the 8x1 architecture required more band-
width than the 128-bit bus designs of the previous gen-
eration due to having double the texture and pixel llrate.
Radeon 9700 introduced ATIs multi-sample gamma-
corrected anti-aliasing scheme. The chip oered sparse-
sampling in modes including 2, 4, and 6. Multi-
ATI R300 GPU sampling oered vastly superior performance over the
supersampling method on older Radeons, and superior
image quality compared to NVIDIAs oerings at the
R300 possessed over twice the geometry processing capa-
time. Anti-aliasing was, for the rst time, a fully us-
bility of the preceding Radeon 8500 and the GeForce4 Ti
able option even in the newest and most demanding titles
4600, in addition to the greater feature-set oered com-
of the day. The R300 also oered advanced anisotropic
pared to DirectX 8 shaders.
ltering which incurred a much smaller performance hit
ATI demonstrated part of what was capable with pixel than the anisotropic solution of the GeForce4 and other
shader PS2.0 with their Rendering with Natural Light competitors cards, while oering signicantly improved
demo. The demo was a real-time implementation of quality over Radeon 8500s anisotropic ltering imple-
noted 3D graphics researcher Paul Debevec's paper on mentation which was highly angle dependent.
the topic of high dynamic range rendering.[1] A note-
On March 14, 2008, AMD released the 3D Register Ref-
worthy limitation is that all R300-generation chips were
erence for R3xx.[2]
designed for a maximum oating point precision of 96-
bit, or FP24, instead of DirectX 9s maximum of 128-
bit FP32. DirectX 9.0 specied FP24 as a minimum 1.2 Performance
level for conforming to the specication for full precision.
This trade-o in precision oered the best combination Radeon 9700s architecture was very ecient and much
of transistor usage and image quality for the manufac- more advanced compared to its peers of 2002. Under
turing process at the time. It did cause a usually visibly normal conditions it beat the GeForce4 Ti 4600, the pre-
imperceptible loss of quality when doing heavy blending. vious top-end card, by 1520%. However, when anti-
ATIs Radeon chips did not go above FP24 until R520. aliasing (AA) and/or anisotropic ltering (AF) were en-
abled it would beat the Ti 4600 by anywhere from 40
100%. At the time, this was quite special, and resulted in
the widespread acceptance of AA and AF as truly usable
features.[3]
Besides advanced architecture, reviewers also took note
of ATIs change in strategy. The 9700 would be the
second of ATIs chips (after the 8500) to be shipped to
third-party manufacturers instead of ATI producing all of
its graphics cards, though ATI would still produce cards
o of its highest-end chips. This freed up engineering
resources that were channeled towards driver improve-
ments, and the 9700 performed phenomenally well at
launch because of this. id Software technical director
ATIs Rendering with Natural Light promo demo John Carmack had the Radeon 9700 run the E3 Doom
3 demonstration.[4]
The R300 was the rst board to truly take advantage of a The performance and quality increases oered by the
256-bit memory bus. Matrox had released their Parhelia R300 GPU are considered to be one of the greatest
2.1 Refreshed 3
in the history of 3D graphics, alongside the achieve- rolled out in early 2003, and while the 9600 PRO didn't
ments GeForce 256 and Voodoo Graphics. Furthermore, outperform the 9500 PRO that it was supposed to replace,
NVIDIAs response in the form of the GeForce FX 5800 it was much more economical for ATI to produce by way
was both late to market and somewhat unimpressive, es- of a 130 nm process (all ATIs cards since the 7500/8500
pecially when pixel shading was used. R300 would be- had been 150 nm) and a simplied design. Radeon 9600s
come one of the GPUs with the longest useful lifetime in RV350 core was basically a 9800 Pro cut in half, with ex-
history, allowing playable performance in new games at actly half of the same functional units, making it a 41
least 3 years after its launch.[5] architecture with 2 vertex shaders. It also lost part of Hy-
perZ III with the removal of the hierarchical z-buer op-
timization unit, the same as Radeon 9500. Using a 130
nm process was also good for pushing up the core clock
2 Further releases speed. The 9600 series, all with high default clocking,
was shown to have quite a bit of headroom by overclock-
A few months later, the 9500 and 9500 PRO were ers (achieving over 500 MHz, from 400 MHz on the Pro
launched. The 9500 PRO had half the memory bus width model). While the 9600 series was less powerful than
of the 9700 PRO, and the 9500 was also missing (dis- the 9500 and 9500 Pro it replaced, it did largely manage
abled) half the pixel processing units and the hierarchi- to maintain the 9500s lead over NVIDIAs GeForce FX
cal Z-buer optimization unit (part of HyperZ III). With 5600 Ultra, and it was ATIs cost-eective answer to the
its full 8 pipelines and ecient architecture, the 9500 long-time mainstream performance board, GeForce4 Ti
PRO outperformed all of NVIDIAs products (save the 4200.
Ti 4600). Meanwhile, the 9500 also became popular be-
During the summer of 2003, the Mobility Radeon 9600
cause it could in some cases be modied into the much
was launched, based upon the RV350 core. Being the
more powerful 9700. ATI only intended for the 9500 se-
rst laptop chip to oer DirectX 9.0 shaders, it enjoyed
ries to be a temporary solution to ll the gap for the 2002
the same success of the previous Mobility Radeons. The
Christmas season, prior to the release of the 9600. Since
Mobility Radeon 9600 was originally planned to use a
all of the R300 chips were based on the same physical
RAM technology called GDDR2-M. The company de-
die, ATIs margins on 9500 products were low. Radeon
veloping that memory went bankrupt and the RAM never
9500 was one of the shortest-lived product of ATI, later
arrived, so ATI was forced to use regular DDR SDRAM.
replaced by the Radeon 9600 series. The logo and box
Undoubtedly there would have been power usage savings,
package of the 9500 was resurrected in 2004 to market
and perhaps performance gains with GDDR2-M. In fall
the unrelated and slower Radeon 9550 (which is a deriva-
2004, a slightly faster variant, the Mobility Radeon 9700
tive of the 9600).
was launched (which was still based upon the RV350, and
not the older R300 of the desktop Radeon 9700 despite
the naming similarity).
2.1 Refreshed
Later in 2003, three new cards were launched: the 9800
In early 2003, the 9700 cards were replaced by the 9800 XT (R360), the 9600 XT (RV360), and the 9600 SE
(or, R350). These were R300s with higher clock speeds, (RV350). The 9800 XT was slightly faster than the
and improvements to the shader units and memory con- 9800 PRO had been, while the 9600 XT competed well
troller which enhanced anti-aliasing performance. They with the newly launched GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.[6] The
were designed to maintain a performance lead over the RV360 chip on 9600 XT was the rst graphics chip by
recently launched GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, which it man- ATI that utilized Low-K chip fabrication and allowed
aged to do without diculty. The 9800 still held its own even higher clocking of the 9600 core (500 MHz default).
against the revised FX 5900, primarily (and signicantly) The 9600 SE was ATIs answer to NVIDIAs GeForce
in tasks involving heavy SM2.0 pixel shading. Another FX 5200 Ultra, managing to outperform the 5200 while
selling point for the 9800 was that it was still a single-slot also being cheaper. Another RV350 board followed in
card, compared to the dual-slot requirements of the FX early 2004, on the Radeon 9550, which was a Radeon
5800 and FX 5900. A later version of the 9800 Pro with 9600 with a lower core clock (though an identical mem-
256 MiB of memory used GDDR2. The other two vari- ory clock and bus width).
ants were the 9800, which was simply a lower-clocked Worthy of note regarding the R300-based generation is
9800 Pro, and the 9800 SE, which had half the pixel that the entire lineup utilized single-slot cooling solutions.
processing units disabled (could sometimes be enabled It was not until the R420 generations Radeon X850 XT
again). Ocial ATI specications dictate a 256-bit mem- Platinum Edition, in December 2004, that ATI would
ory bus for the 9800 SE, but most of the manufacturers adopt an ocial dual-slot cooling design.[7]
used a 128-bit bus. Usually, the 9800 SE with 256-bit
memory bus was called 9800 SE Ultra or 9800 SE
Golden Version.
Alongside the 9800, the 9600 (a.k.a. RV350) series was
4 5 EXTERNAL LINKS
4 References
[1] Debevec, Paul. Rendering with Natural Light, Authors
web page, 1998
6.2 Images
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