Introduction

Meet Ruby

Ruby is ATIs latest action hero

ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO revolutionized the 3D graphics market when it was introduced two summers ago. Not only was ATI first to market with a next generation DirectX 9 graphics card, their RADEON 9700 PRO offered performance that was unrivaled by anyone else on the market, with razor-sharp image quality.

The only real negative with the board was its $400 price tag, but ask anyone who forked over the $400 a couple of years ago, chances are they’re pretty pleased with their purchase. The RADEON 9700 PRO has been holding up well in comparison to newer DX9 cards like the RADEON 9800 PRO and RADEON 9800 XT, not to mention NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5800/5900 series.

Now ATI’s task is to build something better. NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 family, which was just announced two weeks ago, offers a significant performance improvement over previous high-end offerings thanks to its 16-pixel pipeline architecture, brand new shading engine, and high-speed GDDR3 memory with a 256-bit memory interface. If ATI were to answer with anything less, they’d lose valuable mindshare among enthusiasts.

Ruby dodges

Note the detail up close

Remember, at the high-end mindshare can be just as important, if not more important, than volume, as having the positive press that comes with producing the top high-end card can carry over to your other lines in the mainstream and value segments. Mindshare after all, is largely what carried 3dfx in the post-Voodoo2 days.

With this in mind, ATI’s east coast development team set out to create a successor worthy to the R300 core first introduced in the RADEON 9700 PRO. Rather than starting with a blank piece of paper however, ATI’s X800 engineering team decided to take the best aspects of R300, improve on them, and spice up the formula a bit by adding a few new features. ATI’s stated goal was to deliver twice the performance of their previous high-end VPU, all without drawing significantly more power, generating an excessive amount of heat, or drastically increasing production costs.

This was accomplished by going bigger, ATI’s high-end RADEON X800 XT family sports twice as many pixel pipelines as RADEON 9700/RADEON 9800 at 16 pipes, while at the same time going smaller: like RADEON 9600 XT, the X800 series is built on TSMC’s advanced 0.13-micron manufacturing process with low-k dielectric material. Previous high-end architectures utilized TSMC’s battle-tested but larger 0.15-micron process.

He looks mad

Looks like someone got caught in the door

The kingpin, note the refractions on the diamond

ATI refers to its focus with this generation as delivering high-definition gaming. Just as high definition televisions have brought a new level of quality to the TV, ATI plans to deliver more performance and realism to the PC through the use of its 3Dc compression for normal maps, SMARTSHADER HD, SMOOTHVISION HD, and HYPERZ HD technologies.

But what do all these new buzzwords mean?