#Ati radeon x300 windows 10 driver driver#
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Most of the rest of the GPU was extremely similar to R300. ATI showcased many of their chip's new features in the promotional real-time demo called, Ruby: The Doublecross.

#Ati radeon x300 windows 10 driver software#

Software making heavy use of normal mapping could gain a significant speed boost from the savings in fillrate and bandwidth by using 3Dc. 3Dc was based on a modified DXT5 mode, which in fact was a fallback option for hardware not supporting 3Dc. Because DirectX Texture Compression ( DXTC) was block-based and not designed for a normal map's different data properties, a new compression method was needed to prevent loss of detail and other artifacting. Similar to how texture compression had been part of the Direct3D specification for years and was used for compressing regular textures, normal map compression compacted this new type of surface detail layer.

Note, ATI's 'Temporal AA' was actually a temporal dithering filter for spatial AA, not de facto temporal anti-aliasing (which must involve a controlled blending of the temporal subsamples from consecutive screens).ĪTI's Ruby: The Doublecross X800 promo demoĪnother notable addition to the core was a new kind of normal map compression, dubbed ' 3Dc'. However, in games which this performance level could be maintained, Temporal AA was a nice addition to ATI's excellent anti-aliasing options.

#Ati radeon x300 windows 10 driver driver#

If the framerate could not be maintained, the driver will disable Temporal AA. Unfortunately, it required the system to be able to maintain at least 60 frame/s or temporal anti-aliasing would cause a noticeable flickering, because the user would be able to see the alternating AA patterns. A 2X software setting became perceptively equivalent to 4X. By taking advantage of the frame-to-eye effects of a framerate higher than 60 frame/s, the GPU is able to better smooth aliased edges by rotating the anti-aliasing sampling pattern between frames. ĪTI revealed Temporal Anti-Aliasing, a new anti-aliasing technology their chips were capable of. This new revision to PS2.0 increased the maximum number of instructions and registers available to pixel shader programs.

#Ati radeon x300 windows 10 driver full#

A new pixel shader version (PS2.b) allowed slightly greater shader program flexibility than plain PS2.0, but was still shy of full PS3.0 capabilities. With R420's and RV410's 6 vertex shaders combined with higher clock speeds than the previous generation, ATI was able to more than double the geometry processing capability of 9800XT.Īlthough the R420-based chips are fundamentally similar to R300-based cores, ATI did tweak and enhance the pixel shader units for more flexibility. RV410 also significantly outgunned NVIDIA's GeForce 6600GT (3 vertex shaders) on geometry throughput. As such, this chip was obviously designed for a heavier geometry load than texturing, perhaps being tailored for a role as a FireGL chip. Strangely, the X700 mainstream card (RV410) had 6 vertex shaders while only being equipped with 2 quads. Normal and parallax mapping were replacing sheer geometric complexity for model detail, so undoubtedly that was part of the reasoning. This changed the ratio of pixel/vertex shaders from 2:1 (on R300) to 8:3, showing that ATI believed the workload in games as of 2004 and onward to be more pixel shader and texturing oriented than geometry based. When ATI doubled the number of pixel pipelines, they also raised the number of vertex shader engines from 4 to 6. Apparently by reducing tile sizes, ATI was able to optimize for different triangle sizes. This is how the R300-series chips performed their tasks as well, but R420 refined this by allowing programmable tile sizes in order to control work flow on a finer level of granularity. Coined the 'quad dispatch system', the screen is tiled and work is spread out evenly among the separate 'quads' to optimize their throughput. The separation into 'quads' also allowed ATI to design a system to optimize the efficiency of the overall chip. The R420 design was a 4 'quad' arrangement (4 pipelines per quad.) This organization internally allowed ATI to disable defective 'quads' and sell chips with 12, 8 or even 4 pixel pipelines, an evolution of the technique used with Radeon 9500/97SE/9800. One would not be far off seeing the X800 XT basically as a pair of Radeon 9800 cores connected together and also running with a ~30% higher clock speed. The chip came equipped with over double the pixel and vertex pushing resources compared to the Radeon 9800 XT's R360 (a minor evolution of the R350), with 16 DirectX 9.0b pixel pipelines and 16 ROPs. R420 basically takes a 'wider is better' approach to the previous architecture, with some small tweaks thrown in to enhance it in various ways. In terms of supported DirectX features, R420 (codenamed Loki) was very similar to the R300.

2 Releases of the R420 and the next ATI GPU without major architecture modification.