ATI Radeon 9800 Pro - Reference

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Technology & Features

Let's quickly take a brief look at the most important changes of the Radeon 9800 Pro over the 9700 Pro.

SmartShader 2.1Next to a new F-Buffer nothing much changed in comparison with the Radeon 9700 Pro graphics core for you to actually notice with your bare eyes in the game. You'll notice small upgrades in SmartShader technology (2.1), in here we'll find the new F Buffer (Fragment-stream FIFO buffer) which makes it possible to execute an unlimited number of pixel shader programs.

It handles complex effects by passing only the pixels that require multi-passing through the pixel shader engine multiple times, while doing all the other steps in the rendering pipeline just once per pixel. Multi-pass pixels are stored in the F-buffer between passes, rather than writing them out to the frame buffer, so transparent pixels can have foreground and background colors stored separately. This technique saves rendering time, reduces memory bandwidth requirements, and gracefully handles transparency.

Schematische voorstelling F-Buffer

F-Buffer technology is not likely that's we'll see integrated into game software anytime soon as it's advantage is not that high. it's mostly used by professional 3D artists.


Smoothvision 2.1
Next to the Radeon 9700 pro the 9800 Pro has a small upgrade in it's Smoothvision technology also. Smoothvision is a driver setting that allows you to handle Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering techniques. The Radeon 9800 pro can handle up-to 6x Anti Aliasing and 16x Anisotropic Filtering.

SMOOTHVISION 2.1 builds on version 2.0 by incorporating memory controller optimizations that improve rendering performance when anti-aliasing is enabled. The portion of the memory controller that arbitrates read and write requests in the RADEON 9800 PRO was tuned to provide higher efficiency under the heaviest bandwidth loads. The performance benefits of these improvements are most obvious when using the 4x and 6x anti-aliasing modes at resolutions greater than 1024x768.

Full Scene Anti Aliasing (FSAA)
Full-Scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) is a sampling technique that creates more detailed and realistic looking images, by removing the stair stepping effect seen on the edges of objects within computer generated images. High quality anti-aliased graphics are achieved with sub-pixel edge detection and color compression for greatly improved performance. Full scene anti-aliasing modes 2x/4x/6x.

antial.jpg

Anisotropic Filtering
Anisotropic filtering enhances overall 3D quality by rendering sharp, detailed textures. As more texture samples are filtered, the image quality improves. Without Anisotropic Filtering, objects and environments in the 3D world will appear blurry and fuzzy, effectively degrading the level of realism.

anisotr.jpg

Anisotropic filtering improves image quality by sampling textures more frequently. This is particularly important for objects rotated at sharp angles relative to the viewpoint. For example, textured flat ground in the distance and scenes with rotating 3D objects in the foreground will both benefit from anisotropic filtering, and are typically found in todays gaming content. The R300 VPU filters more samples than the competition, with minimal performance degradation. Supported Anisotropic filtering modes on the Radeon 9800 Pro are  2x/4x/8x/16x

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