More R600 news
Author: Vedran Dakic
Date: 23 Apr 2007

The 2900 series, aimed at complete Enthusiasts, offer a couple of more technology-related things then previously noted, from what we could gather by our sources. here. First news - R600 has Programmable Tesselation Unit, featured in the XBOX chip, as well. This is a neat feature for the game developpers that was pretty much "in the air" in the DX9 generation (Truform support) and now it's back and running. We'll talk more about this later. The 2600 series should be up and running up to 800MHz clock speed, using unique TSMC 65nm+ process. The 2400 series also has 320 SP's, and we're talking about superscalar ALU as well (dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors). Dynamic shader load balancing is also there, according to our sources, and they are telling us that R600 has no central memory controller, so to speak, it has FD ring bus with mesh interconnection, or, put into words - eight 64-bit memory channels, as we previously wrote.


TMU's have 64-bit HDR textures bilinear filtering at true speed, as well as 128-bit FP textures working at half speed. There's also support for 32-bit shared exponent texture format (RGBE 9:9:9:5). AMD also claims some 50x the power of 8800GTX in geometry operations, which we will soon see in action. We got a couple of questions from our readers concerning the new AA/AF methods, and we have a couple of things to add to our previous article - you can use Custom Filter AA up to 24x, also new 8x Multisample AA, you can even update patterns/filters via driver update.

CrossFire has always been a pain in the neck for us (Master cards), but now that it's gone, a couple of details about that, as well. R600 has native CF support (composite engine in the GPU), supporting AFR, SuperTile, Scissor and SuperAA modes. AFR detect algorithm changed, as well - it's upgraded with a new mode for best scalability (it falls back to SuperTile if AFR isn't working). You can even use displays up to 2560x2048, UVD and AVP, and full HD support, as we previously wrote.

We're in the state of constant amazement by this technology and have a very positive feeling about the overal "capability" of these cards. Can't wait to see them in action.