Radeon

AMD Radeon Graphics

The Radeon Graphics logo
Manufacturer	AMD

AMD Radeon, formerly ATI Radeon, is a brand of graphics processing units (GPU) that since 2000 has been manufactured by ATI Technologies and subsequently AMD and is the successor to their Rage line. There are four different groups, which can be differentiated by the DirectX generation they support. More specific distinctions can also be followed, such as the HyperZ version, the number of pixel pipelines, and of course, the memory and processor clock speeds. The brand was previously known as "ATI Radeon" until August 2010, when it was renamed to create a more unified brand image.^[1] Current products will retain the ATI moniker, however future products will utilise the new branding.^[2]

Radeon processor generations

Radeon card brands

AMD no longer sells Radeon cards directly at the retail level. Instead, it sells Radeon GPUs to third-party manufacturers, who build and sell the Radeon-based video cards to the OEM and retail channel. Card manufacturers of the Radeon include Diamond Multimedia, Sapphire Technology, AsusTek, HIS – Hightech Information System Limited, Micro-Star International, PowerColor, Gigabyte, VisionTek, and, recently, XFX, and Gainward.

Product naming scheme

At current, ATI names each card by generation, series, and by performance. The first number is the generation number, for example, 5000, and this is related to the chipset used by the video card. The second number indicates the series quality in the generation, starting from 0400 to 0600 at entry level, for media and home theatre, 0700 for low intensity video games (typically using older graphics engines, or widespread games, such as Starcraft and World of Warcraft) or high-intensity games with lowered settings, and 0800 for high-intensity games, such as Crysis or Far Cry 2. 0900 is a special denotation, first used on the Radeon 5970, relating to a dual chip or internal Crossfire card. The third digit is the relative quality, within a series- a 5850 is less powerful than a 5870. Typically, a card of a higher series will always have more processing power than a card in a lower series, even if the relative quality is better (a 5770 will be trumped by a 5850).

Since ATI's first DirectX 9-class GPU, the company has followed a naming scheme that relates each product to a market segment.

• ^1 Stream processors only applicable to Radeon HD 2000 series video cards.

Since the release of the Radeon HD 3000 series products, previous PRO, XT, GT, and XTX suffixes were eliminated, products will be differentiated by changing the last two digits of the product model number (for instance, HD 3850 and HD 3870, giving the impression that the HD 3870 model having higher performance than HD 3850).^[4] Similar changes to the integrated graphics processor (IGP) naming were spotted as well, for the previously launched AMD M690T chipset with side-port memory, the IGP is named Radeon X1270, while for the AMD 690G chipset, the IGP is named Radeon X1250, as for AMD 690V chipset, the IGP is clocked lower and having fewer functions and thus named Radeon X1200. The new numbering scheme of video products are shown below:

• ^1 The last two digits denotes variant, similar to the previous suffixes, which 70 is in essence the XT variant while 50 is actually the Pro variant.^[5][6]
• ^2 Stream processors only applicable to Direct3D 10-class video components and above (Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000/5000 series).

Since the release of the Evergreen GPU family (R800), the X2 suffix, which indicated the presence of two graphic chips on the same card, has been dropped in favour of placing the number "9" as second digit of the model number. (i.e. HD 5970)

Drivers

Windows

The ATI Radeon graphics driver package for Windows operating system is called ATI Catalyst.

There are unofficial modifications available such as Omega drivers and DNA drivers. These drivers typically consist of mixtures of various driver file versions with some registry variables altered and are advertised as offering superior performance or image quality. They are, of course, unsupported, and as such, are not guaranteed to function correctly. Some of them also provide modified system files for hardware enthusiasts to run specific graphics cards outside of their specifications.

Macintosh

ATI used to only offer driver updates for their retail Mac video cards, but now also offer drivers for all ATI Mac products, including the GPUs in Apple's portable lines. Apple also includes ATI driver updates whenever they release a new OS update. ATI provides a preference panel for use in Mac OS X called ATI Displays which can be used both with retail and OEM versions of its cards. Though it gives more control over advanced features of the graphics chipset, ATI Displays has limited functionality compared to their Catalyst for Windows product.

ATI stopped support for Mac OS 9 after the Radeon R200 cards, making the last officially supported card the Radeon 9200. The Radeon R100 cards up to the Radeon 7000 can still be used with even older Mac OS versions such as System 7, although not all features are taken advantage of by the older operating system.^[7]

Linux

Initially, ATI did not produce Radeon drivers for Linux, instead giving hardware specifications and documentation to Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) developers under various non-disclosure agreements.

In mid 2004, however, ATI started to support Linux (XFree86, X.Org), hiring a new Linux driver team to produce fglrx. Their new proprietary Linux drivers, instead of being a port of the Windows Catalyst drivers, were based on the Linux drivers for the FireGL (the FireGL drivers worked with Radeons before, but didn't officially support them), a card geared towards graphics producers, not gamers; though the display drivers part is now based on the same sources as the ones from Windows Catalyst since version 4.x in late 2004. The proprietary Linux drivers could support R200 (Radeon 8500-9200, 9250) chips.^[8] For a better display driver, the repository drivers are recommended.

The frequency of driver updates increased in late 2004, releasing Linux drivers every two months, half as often as their Windows counterparts. Then since late 2005 this has been increased to monthly releases, inline with the Windows Catalyst releases.

In 2008, ATI changed its release cycles and driver versions; now referred to as Catalyst <year>.<month>, the driver package still includes an internal 8.xx.x driver revision, but it is now monthly, sharing a common code base with the Windows driver (starting with internal release 8.43). In 2009, the Catalyst driver officially dropped support for R500 and older chips, the FOSS driver being deemed stable and complete enough. The last driver release supporting older architectures is Catalyst 9.3.

For information on alternative Open Source drivers, see below.

FreeBSD

FreeBSD systems have the same open-source support for Radeon hardware as Linux, including 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300-series chipsets. The R300 support, as with Linux, remained experimental due to being reverse-engineered from ATI's proprietary drivers, but with the release of official documentation by AMD (following its buying out of Ati), all Radeon families up to R700 have at least 2D support in the FOSS drivers, with basic video acceleration and power management, and up to R500, have at least 'basic' (up to OpenGL 1.5 feature set, GLSL is still a work in progress) 3D acceleration. On R600/700, 3D is still very much experimental, and Evergreen support has barely started due to lack of documentation.

ATI does not support its proprietary fglrx driver on FreeBSD, it has been partly ported by a third party as of January 2007. This is in contrast to its main rival, NVIDIA, which has periodically released its proprietary driver for FreeBSD since November 2002 (64-bit beta driver available as of December 3, 2009). In the meantime, the release is similar to Linux.

MidnightBSD

MidnightBSD supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300 chipsets. This support is similar to FreeBSD and Linux.

AmigaOS

Since the introduction of AmigaOS 4 users gained partial support for R100/R200 Radeon cards ^[9] (Radeon 8500/9100 have no 3D support). Currently, RadeonHD R700 Amiga OS4 driver is under development by 3rd party developer.^[10] The AmigaOne X1000, slated for release in 2010, will include an R700 based GPU.^[11]

BeOS

Although ATI does not provide its own drivers for BeOS, it provides hardware and technical documentation to the Haiku Project who provide drivers with full 2D and video in/out support. They are the sole graphics manufacturer in any way still supporting BeOS.

MorphOS

MorphOS supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets^[12].

FOSS drivers

On September 12, 2007, AMD released documentation without an NDA for the RV630 (Radeon HD 2600 PRO and Radeon HD 2600 XT) and M56 (Radeon Mobility X1600) chips for open source driver development, for its strategic open source driver development initiative^[13]. This initial documentation released sufficient programming information for a skeleton display detection and modesetting driver to be released. This was version 1.0.0 of the radeonhd driver, developed in cooperation with Novell. The register reference guides for M76 (Mobility Radeon HD 2600/2700/3600/3800 series) and RS690 (AMD 690 chipset series) were also released on January 4, 2008.^[14].

Most of the work is shared with the existing Xorg radeon driver that also supports older Radeon architectures.^[15][16] Conceptually, radeonhd initially tried to directly hit a card's register to perform its operations, while Xorg's driver radeon makes use of AtomBIOS (an abstraction layer created by Ati to ease the programming of new video card drivers) when available. Since AtomBIOS headers have been made public by AMD and are kept up to date,^[17] the argument went rather moot.^[18]

As of December 2009, the DRM part of the radeon driver is now included in the mainstream Linux kernel, the first version appearing in kernel version 2.6.32, used by default on several GNU/Linux distributions.

See also

• Comparison of ATI graphics processing units
• ATI Rage – previous series of ATI's video cards
• Nvidia
• Video In Video Out (VIVO)

References

External links

• ATI Technologies Inc.
• DRI Wiki: ATI Radeon
• Rage3D: Support community for ATI hardware and drivers. News and discussion.
• Driver downloads for all Radeon cards.
• strags.com: WHQL certified Mobility Radeon HD driver archive.
• Information about all Radeon based graphics cards.