Adaptive Anti-Aliasing

New technology? apparently not but it is new to a lot of us. Adaptive anti aliasing was introduced by Nvidia in the G70 core, but checking this link on Adaptive Anti-Aliasing it shows you how to enable it in ATI cards from Radeon 9500 upwards. Now onto what Adaptive Anti-Aliasing actually does.

The previous versions of Anti-Aliasing being Super-Sampling and Multi-Sampling could not handle everything that was needed to anti-alias a whole screen. Super-Sampling was simply too slow and expensive to implement, multi-sampling now the common method also had a problem. It worked by detecting edges of objects to reduce the amount of work needed to be done. One thing it couldn't do is anti-alias Alpha textures. I hear cries of what on earth are Alpha textures? to to put your mind at ease, an alpha texture is like a normal texture except it uses the alpha channel to give the texture transparent qualities, used for fences or shrubbery etc. With adaptive Anti-Aliasing a new algorithm has been written to allow the anti-aliasing of alpha textures. The algorithm searches out Alpha textures and uses Supersampling on this part of the screen to give a full AA effect. More info on Anti-Aliasing techniques here

Crossfire

Crossfire is ATI solution to SLI technology. This allows you to combine two graphics cards together and use them simultaneously to increase the performance of your graphics subsystem by almost double. This is proving a very popular way of upgrading, because you don't have to buy both graphics cards together. Upgrade to one now and buy another later when you need to upgrade again. Its the cheapest way as the graphics card prices will have come down. Certain requirements need to be met with crossfire. Read our article on Crossfire for more information.

PCI Express

Like the vast majority of graphics cards released now. the Radeon X1300 uses the PCI Express bus and not AGP (AGP available with an extra hardware bridge chip), check your motherboard before purchasing one of these cards. Chances are you will have a PCI express slot if your motherboard is under 2 years old. Refer to your motherboard manual for details.

For more information on PCI Express read our article here

Full Chipset Details of the ATI Radeon X1800 (R520)

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads

• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic

• Fully associative texture, colour, and Z/stencil cache designs

• Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test

• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)

• Fast Z-Buffer Clear

• Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware

• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations

• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads

• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control

• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency

• 3Dc+ texture compression

  • High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats

  • High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats

• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support

• Render to vertex buffer support

• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

• 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline

  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

• 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline

  • Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing

• 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes

  • Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling

  • New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes

  • Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode

  • Lossless Colour Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

• 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes

  • Up to 128-tap texture filtering

  • Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options

• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding and transcoding

DXVA support

De-blocking and noise reduction filtering

Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and colour space conversion

Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing

3:2 pull down (frame rate conversion)

Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time

HDR tone mapping acceleration

• Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output

Flexible display support

• Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters

  • DVI 1.0 compliant / HDMI interoperable and HDCP ready

• Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs

• 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output

• Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, colour correction, and colour space conversion (10 bits per colour)

• Complete, independent colour controls and video overlays for each display

• High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with under scan support for all outputs

• Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays

• Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analogue output

• YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays

• Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit colour quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays

• Fast, glitch-free mode switching

• VGA mode support on all outputs

• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates

Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theatre 550

Alternate Frame Rendering (maximum performance)

Supertiling (optimal load-balancing)

Scissor (compatibility)

Super AA 8x/10x/12x/14x (maximum image quality)

Useful Links For the Radeon X1800