Radeon X1800 GTO preview - Page 3

ATI recently focused extremely hard on HDR, just like NVIDIA did. They put a lot of money into their technology to support HDR in the best possible way. And they should as it just is a fantastic effect that brings so much more to the your gameplay experience. HDR is something you all know from games like Far Cry, extremely bright lighting that brings a really cool cinematic effect to gaming. This effect is becoming extraordinarily popular and the difference is obvious. HDR means High Dynamic Range. HDR facilitates the use of color values way beyond the normal range of the color palette in an effort to produce a more extreme form of lighting rendering. Typically this trick is used to contrast really dark scenery. Extreme sunlight, over-saturation or over exposure is a good example of what exactly is possible. The most simple way to describe it would be controlling the amount of light used present in a certain position in a 3D scene. HDR is already present in Far Cry, Half Life 2: Lost Coast,Serious Sam2, 3DMark06 and will be available in Unreal 3 to name a few titles.

One last thing about HDR, ATI's HDR resolution can manage Antialiasing with HDR enabled, some games need to be patched though, I expect one from CryTek soon! And you might want to check our download section for an unofficial patch.

As you know HDR together with AA enabled always has been an issue, no longer. You can enable HDR and up to 6xAA.

Let a screenshot do the talking.

That Ring of Fire - the ring bus memory controller

With the introduction of the X1000 family of ATI Radeon cards next to the big internal architectural overhaul throughout the chip design, one of the biggest and most impressive changes in the graphics core simply has to be the new memory controller. It seriously is a piece of art if you study closer. Once we got the specs presented to us I immediately had to think about the Creative Labs X-Fi, which we recently reviewed. Both products are of course completely different and have, well not very much in common except one thing, an internal ring bus design. Included onto the card is the new memory controller that works on a very advanced manner. 

I'll try to explain it in a very simple manner because the controller is so advanced you can easily get confused. Take for example a car, which in our case is a memory client request to the memory controller. Look at this entire procedure as a traffic, normally you have to deal with congestion at a certain point where it's busy at that crossing right? If enough cars keep coming in you'll get congestion. What do you do with such traffic congestion/traffic jam? Yes indeed, everywhere in the world we build multi-lane traffic circles and insert traffic lights at the beginning crossings to prioritize and streamline traffic into the right direction.

Now think of the car (client data request) as traffic being sent to the ordinary crossing and in the new situation the traffic circle with traffic lights. Yes this is in laymen terms the way the new controller functions. Huge flows of data traffic are no longer launched towards the memory controllers where it's jammed up, it's now rated based on priority flag (at the proverbial traffic lights) and then send into the right direction over the traffic circle. If we color coded 4 data packets green, yellow , blue and orange then each color will have a certain priority, you tag the data request. If red is the color has the most priority it'll be prioritized and send to the most memory unit connected to the controller. If a 'ornage' data packet has less priority it would be managed in a slower stage. What the result of this in very laymen terms explained the new ringbus memory controller. It's way more dynamic in the manner it can handle its memory packets. The end result, a more efficient memory controller that will utilize available bandwidth to the maximum. And memory bandwidth is one of the biggest limitations in the graphics industry so a lot can be won here.

The new ringbus memory controller

Another good thing to know is that the new memory controller can handle any kind of DDR memory, whether that is DDR1 or gDDR3 it will handle it fine. Next to that, and less important for you though, it should be very future proof as it's gDDR4 ready and probably can even work with gDDR5 which is in early design stages already. It has been built with that in mind. It can handle extremely high clocks, it's very dynamic and very efficient according to the theory. The design in all honesty looks like a classy piece of art. Of course the raw performance and effect on overall framerate will in the end have the final say.

AVIVO (Advanced Video in and Out)

Ever since the release of Last years Catalyst 5.13 driver some stuff has changed for the better, media wise. As we all know and as I've been preaching for a while now we see the living room entertainment coming to the PC more and more in a very fast fashion. One of the most popular thing we've noticed here in Europe has to be HDTV and everything related to it. The trend started last year already and hey even yours truly bought a HDTV recently, and I'm a technology trend setter! It's coming fast and quite frankly, thank God for that as watching content in HD is simply fantastic. So how does that relate to graphics cards? In more ways then you think, just look at the latest trend of HTPC's, Home Theater PC's. Things like Media Center PC's here and there? Do you get where I'm going with this?

Yes exactly this kind of thing is what I am talking about. This is the future of media playback and the PC is going to play a very important role in that. Since it's a PC you probably want a graphics card in there that can support all the cool and extensive features. So media playback and decoding is a process that can, is and will be moved towards the graphics card. Both NVIDIA and ATI already had excellent implementations of it. ATI just took it onto a next level though. With exactly this kind of stuff in mind they introduced the new AVIVO feature.

Avivo will be an integral component in all of ATI's upcoming desktop, mobile, chipset, workstation and software products. As stated Media Center PC's are getting really popular. TV is going digital and HD/HD2(?) Blu-ray and HD-DVD are coming. Digital photography is everywhere. AVIVO is a video and display platform that achieves better video quality. AVIVO will be integral in all future ATI products. Smooth vivid playback. Flawless playback for both SD and HD television that's what this stuff is intended for from a decoding point of view. With two dual link DVI ports which are supported on the entire X1000 range two High definition screens can be connected.

It's almost suffice to say that you can have HDTV output digital over the DVI both analog and digital but also (YPrPb component), as well as S-Video and Composite (which of course can't do HD signals). The product series has full support up-to 1080P H.264 hardware Accelerated decoding and mark my words H.264 is the next standard that can and probably will replace MPEG4. I've seen it, I've tested it and it is looking brilliant with far less bandwidth.