Radeon 8000 series

The R200 is the second generation of GPUs used in Radeon graphics cards and developed by ATI Technologies. This GPU features 3D acceleration based upon Microsoft Direct3D 8.1 and OpenGL 1.3, a major improvement in features and performance compared to the preceding Radeon R100 design. The GPU also includes 2D GUI acceleration, video acceleration, and multiple display outputs. "R200" refers to the development codename of the initially released GPU of the generation. It is the basis for a variety of other succeeding products.

ATI Radeon 8000 series
Release dateAugust 14, 2001 (August 14, 2001)
CodenameChaplin
ArchitectureRadeon R200
Transistors60M 150nm (R200)
  • 60M 150nm (R250)
Cards
Mid-range8500LE
High-end8500
Enthusiast8500XT
API support
Direct3DDirect3D 8.1
Shader Model 1.4
OpenGLOpenGL 1.3[1][2]
History
PredecessorRadeon 7000 series
SuccessorRadeon 9000 series
Support status
Unsupported

Radeon Feature Matrix

The following table shows features of AMD/ATI's GPUs (see also: List of AMD graphics processing units).

Name of GPU series Wonder Mach 3D Rage Rage Pro Rage 128 R100 R200 R300 R400 R500 R600 RV670 R700 Evergreen Northern
Islands		 Southern
Islands		 Sea
Islands		 Volcanic
Islands		 Arctic
Islands/Polaris		 Vega Navi 1x Navi 2x Navi 3x
Released 1986 1991 Apr
1996		 Mar
1997		 Aug
1998		 Apr
2000		 Aug
2001		 Sep
2002		 May
2004		 Oct
2005		 May
2007		 Nov
2007		 Jun
2008		 Sep
2009		 Oct
2010		 Jan
2012		 Sep
2013		 Jun
2015		 Jun 2016, Apr 2017, Aug 2019 Jun 2017, Feb 2019 Jul
2019		 Nov
2020		 Dec
2022
Marketing Name Wonder Mach 3D
Rage		 Rage
Pro		 Rage
128		 Radeon
7000		 Radeon
8000		 Radeon
9000		 Radeon
X700/X800		 Radeon
X1000		 Radeon
HD 2000		 Radeon
HD 3000		 Radeon
HD 4000		 Radeon
HD 5000		 Radeon
HD 6000		 Radeon
HD 7000		 Radeon
200		 Radeon
300		 Radeon
400/500/600		 Radeon
RX Vega, Radeon VII		 Radeon
RX 5000		 Radeon
RX 6000		 Radeon
RX 7000
AMD support Ended Current
Kind 2D 3D
Instruction set architecture Not publicly known TeraScale instruction set GCN instruction set RDNA instruction set
Microarchitecture TeraScale 1
(VLIW)		 TeraScale 2
(VLIW5)
TeraScale 2
(VLIW5)
up to 68xx		TeraScale 3
(VLIW4)
in 69xx [3][4]
 GCN 1st
gen		 GCN 2nd
gen		 GCN 3rd
gen		 GCN 4th
gen		 GCN 5th
gen		 RDNA RDNA 2 RDNA 3
Type Fixed pipeline[lower-alpha 1] Programmable pixel & vertex pipelines Unified shader model
Direct3D — 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.1 9.0
11 (9_2)		 9.0b
11 (9_2)		 9.0c
11 (9_3)		 10.0
11 (10_0)		 10.1
11 (10_1)		 11 (11_0) 11 (11_1)
12 (11_1)		 11 (12_0)
12 (12_0)		 11 (12_1)
12 (12_1)		 11 (12_1)
12 (12_2)
Shader model — 1.4 2.0+ 2.0b 3.0 4.0 4.1 5.0 5.1 5.1
6.5		 6.7
OpenGL — 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1[lower-alpha 2][5] 3.3 4.5 (on Linux: 4.5 (Mesa 3D 21.0))[6][7][8][lower-alpha 3] 4.6 (on Linux: 4.6 (Mesa 3D 20.0))
Vulkan — 1.0
(Win 7+ or Mesa 17+)		 1.2 (Adrenalin 20.1.2, Linux Mesa 3D 20.0)
1.3 (GCN 4 and above (with Adrenalin 22.1.2, Mesa 22.0))		 1.3
OpenCL — Close to Metal 1.1 (no Mesa 3D support) 1.2+ (on Linux: 1.1+ (no Image support on clover, with by rustiCL) with Mesa 3D, 1.2+ on GCN 1.Gen) 2.0+ (Adrenalin driver on Win7+)
(on Linux ROCM, Linux Mesa 3D 1.2+ (no Image support in clover, but in rustiCL with Mesa 3D, 2.0+ and 3.0 with AMD drivers or AMD ROCm), 5th gen: 2.2 win 10+ and Linux RocM 5.0+		 2.2+ and 3.0 windows 8.1+ and Linux ROCM 5.0+ (Mesa 3D rustiCL 1.2+ and 3.0 (2.1+ and 2.2+ wip)) [9] [10][11]
HSA / ROCm — Yes ?
Video decoding ASIC — Avivo/UVD UVD+ UVD 2 UVD 2.2 UVD 3 UVD 4 UVD 4.2 UVD 5.0 or 6.0 UVD 6.3 UVD 7 [12][lower-alpha 4] VCN 2.0 [12][lower-alpha 4] VCN 3.0 [13] VCN 4.0
Video encoding ASIC — VCE 1.0 VCE 2.0 VCE 3.0 or 3.1 VCE 3.4 VCE 4.0 [12][lower-alpha 4]
Fluid Motion [lower-alpha 5] No Yes No ?
Power saving ? PowerPlay PowerTune PowerTune & ZeroCore Power ?
TrueAudio — Via dedicated DSP Via shaders
FreeSync — 1
2
HDCP[lower-alpha 6] ? 1.4 2.2 2.3 [14]
PlayReady[lower-alpha 6] — 3.0 No 3.0
Supported displays[lower-alpha 7] 1–2 2 2–6 ?
Max. resolution ? 2–6 ×
2560×1600		 2–6 ×
4096×2160 @ 30 Hz		 2–6 ×
5120×2880 @ 60 Hz		 3 ×
7680×4320 @ 60 Hz [15]
7680×4320 @ 60 Hz PowerColor		 7680x4320

@165 HZ

/drm/radeon[lower-alpha 8] Yes —
/drm/amdgpu[lower-alpha 8] — Experimental [16] Yes
  1. The Radeon 100 Series has programmable pixel shaders, but do not fully comply with DirectX 8 or Pixel Shader 1.0. See article on R100's pixel shaders.
  2. R300, R400 and R500 based cards do not fully comply with OpenGL 2+ as the hardware does not support all types of non-power of two (NPOT) textures.
  3. OpenGL 4+ compliance requires supporting FP64 shaders and these are emulated on some TeraScale chips using 32-bit hardware.
  4. The UVD and VCE were replaced by the Video Core Next (VCN) ASIC in the Raven Ridge APU implementation of Vega.
  5. Video processing for video frame rate interpolation technique. In Windows it works as a DirectShow filter in your player. In Linux, there is no support on the part of drivers and / or community.
  6. To play protected video content, it also requires card, operating system, driver, and application support. A compatible HDCP display is also needed for this. HDCP is mandatory for the output of certain audio formats, placing additional constraints on the multimedia setup.
  7. More displays may be supported with native DisplayPort connections, or splitting the maximum resolution between multiple monitors with active converters.
  8. DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) is a component of the Linux kernel. AMDgpu is the Linux kernel module. Support in this table refers to the most current version.

Radeon R200 (8xxx, 9xxx) series
Main article: Radeon R200
  • All models are manufactured with a 150 nm fabrication process
  • All models include DirectX 8.1 and OpenGL 1.4
Model Launch Code name Bus interface Memory (MiB) Core clock (MHz) Memory clock (MHz) Config core1 Fillrate Memory
MOperations/s MPixels/s MTexels/s MVertices/s Bandwidth (GB/s) Bus type Bus width (bit)
Radeon 8500LE Oct 30,

2001[17]

 R200 AGP 4x 64, 128 250 250 4:2:8:4 1000 1000 2000 125 8 DDR 128
Radeon 8500 Aug 14, 2001 R200 AGP 4x 64, 128 275 275 4:2:8:4 1100 1100 2200 137.5 8.8 DDR 128
Radeon 8500XT Unreleased R250 AGP 4x 128 300 300 4:2:8:4 1200 1200 2400 150 9.6 DDR 128

Architecture

R200's 3D hardware consists of 4 pixel pipelines, each with 2 texture sampling units. It has 2 vertex shaders and a legacy Direct3D 7 TCL unit, marketed as Charisma Engine II. It is ATI's first GPU with programmable pixel and vertex processors, called Pixel Tapestry II and compliant with Direct3D 8.1. R200 has advanced memory bandwidth saving and overdraw reduction hardware called HyperZ II that consists of occlusion culling (hierarchical Z), fast z-buffer clear, and z-buffer compression. The GPU is capable of dual display output (HydraVision) and is equipped with a video decoding engine (Video Immersion II) with adaptive hardware deinterlacing, temporal filtering, motion compensation, and iDCT.

R200 introduced pixel shader version 1.4 (PS1.4), a significant enhancement to prior PS1.x specifications. Notable instructions include "phase", "texcrd", and "texld". The phase instruction allows a shader program to operate on two separate "phases" (2 passes through the hardware), effectively doubling the maximum number of texture addressing and arithmetic instructions, and potentially allowing the number of passes required for an effect to be reduced. This allows not only more complicated effects, but can also provide a speed boost by utilizing the hardware more efficiently. The "texcrd" instruction moves the texture coordinate values of a texture into the destination register, while the "texld" instruction will load the texture at the coordinates specified in the source register to the destination register.

Compared to R100's 2x3 pixel pipeline architecture, R200's 4x2 design is more robust despite losing one texture unit per pipeline. Each pipeline can now address a total of 6 texture layers per pass. The chip achieves this by using a method known as 'loop-back'. Increasing the number of textures accessed per pass reduces the number of times the card is forced into multi-pass rendering.

The texture filtering capabilities of R200 are also improved over its predecessor. For anisotropic filtering, Radeon 8500 uses a technique similar to that used in R100, but improved with trilinear filtering and some other refinements. However, it is still highly angle-dependent and the driver sometimes forces bilinear filtering for speed. NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series offered a more accurate anisotropic implementation, but with a greater performance impact.

R200 has ATI's first implementation of a hardware-accelerated tessellation engine (a.k.a. higher order surfaces), called Truform, which can automatically increase the geometric complexity of 3D models. The technology requires developer support and is not practical for all scenarios. It can undesirably round-out models. As a result of very limited adoption, ATI dropped TruForm support from its future hardware.

DirectX 8.0
Pixel Shader 1.1		DirectX 8.1
Pixel Shader 1.4
Max. Texture Inputs 4 6
Max. Program Length 12 instructions
(up to 4 texture sampling, 8 color blending)		 22 instructions
(up to 6 texture sampling, 8 texture addressing, 8 color blending)
Instruction Set 13 address operations, 8 color operations 12 address / color operations
Texture Addressing Modes 40 virtually unlimited

Performance

Radeon 8500's biggest disappointment was its early driver releases. At launch, the card's performance was below expectations and it had numerous software flaws that caused problems with games. The chip's anti-aliasing support was only functional in Direct3D and was very slow. To dampen excitement for 8500, competitor nVidia released their Detonator4 driver package on the same day as most web sites previewed the Radeon 8500. nVidia's drivers were of better quality, and they also further boosted the GeForce 3's performance.

Several hardware review sites discovered that the performance of the Radeon 8500 in some actual game tests was lower than benchmarks reflected. For example, ATI was detecting the executable "Quake3.exe" and forcing the texture filtering quality to much lower than normally produced by the card. HardOCP was the first hardware review web site to bring the issue to the community, and proved its existence by renaming all instances of "Quake" in the executable to "Quack."[18] The result was improved image quality, but lower performance.

However, even with the Detonator4 drivers, the Radeon 8500 was able to outperform the GeForce 3 (which the 8500 was intended to compete against) and in some circumstances its faster revision, the Ti500, the higher clocked derivative Nvidia had rolled out in response to the R200 project. Later, driver updates helped to further close the performance gap between the 8500 and the Ti500, while the 8500 was also significantly less expensive and offered additional multimedia features such as dual-monitor support. Though the GeForce 3 Ti200 did become the first DirectX 8.0 card to offer 128 MiB of video memory, instead of the common 64 MiB norm for high-end cards of the time, it turned out that the GeForce 3's limitations prevented it from taking full advantage of it, while the Radeon 8500 was able to more successfully exploit that potential.

In early 2002, to compete with the cheaper GeForce 3 Ti200 and GeForce 4 MX 460, ATI launched the slower-clocked 8500LE (known as 9100 in Europe) which became popular with OEMs and enthusiasts due to its lower price, and overclockability to 8500 levels. Though the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 took the performance crown, it was a top line solution that was priced almost double that of the Radeon 8500 (MSRP of US$350–399 versus US$199), so it did not offer direct competition. With the delayed release of the potentially competitive GeForce 4 Ti 4200, plus ATI's initiative in rolling out 128 MiB versions of the 8500/LE kept the R200 line popular among the mid-high performance niche market. The greater features of the All-In-Wonder (AIW) Radeon 8500 DV and the AIW Radeon 8500 128 MB proved superior to Nvidia's Personal Cinema equivalents which used the faster GeForce 4 Ti 4200.

Implementations

Radeon 8500/8500LE

ATI's first R200-based card was the Radeon 8500, launched in Aug 14, 2001. In the end of Oct, 2001, ATI launched the Radeon 8500LE (re-released later as the Radeon 9100 in Europe), an identical chip with a lower clock speed and slower memory. Whereas the full 8500 was clocked at 275 MHz core and 275 MHz RAM, the 8500LE was clocked more conservatively at 250 MHz for the core and 200 or 250 MHz for the RAM. Both video cards were first released in 64 MB DDR SDRAM configurations; the later 128 MB Radeon 8500 boards received a small performance boost resulting from a memory interleave mode.

In November 2001 was the release of the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 DV, with 64 MB and a slower clock speed like the 8500LE. In 2002, three 128 MB cards were rolled out, the Radeon 8500, 8500LE, and the All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 128 MB, which was clocked at full 8500 speeds but had fewer video-related features than the AIW 8500 DV. ATI claimed that the lower clock speed for the 8500DV was due to the FireWire interface.

Radeon 8500XT (canceled)

An updated chip, the Radeon 8500XT (R250) was planned for a mid-2002 release, to compete against the GeForce 4 Ti line, particularly the top line Ti 4600 (which retailed for an MSRP of $350–399 USD). Prerelease information touted a 300 MHz core and RAM clock speed for the "R250" chip.

A Radeon 8500 running at 300 MHz clock speeds would have hardly defeated the GeForce 4 Ti4600, let alone a newer card from NVIDIA. At best it could have been a better performing mid-range solution than the lower-complexity Radeon 9000 (RV250, see below), but it would also have cost more to produce and would have been poorly suited to the Radeon 9000's dual laptop/desktop roles due to die size and power draw. Notably, overclockers found that Radeon 8500 and Radeon 9000 could not reliably overclock to 300 MHz without additional voltage, so undoubtedly R250 would have had similar issues because of its greater complexity and equivalent manufacturing technology, and this would have resulted in poor chip yields, and thus, higher costs.[19][20]

ATI, perhaps mindful of what had happened to 3dfx when they took focus off their "Rampage" processor, abandoned the R250 refresh in favor of finishing off their next-generation DirectX 9.0 card which was released as the Radeon 9700. This proved to be a wise move, as it enabled ATI to take the lead in development for the first time instead of trailing NVIDIA. The new Radeon 9700 flagship, with its next-generation architecture giving it unprecedented features and performance, would have been superior to any R250 refresh, and it easily took the performance crown from the Ti4600.

Models
Main article: Comparison of ATI Graphics Processing Units

Drivers
Main article: Free_and_open-source_device_drivers:_graphics § ATI.2FAMD
Main article: Mesa 3D

The open-source drivers from X.org/Mesa support almost all features provided by the R200 hardware.[21] They are shipped by default on most BSDs and Linux systems. Newer ATI Catalyst drivers do not offer support for any R500 or older architecture product.

Windows drivers

This series of Radeon graphics cards is supported by AMD under Microsoft Windows operating systems including Windows XP (except x64), Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows 98. Other operating systems may have support in the form of a generic driver that lacks complete support for the hardware. Driver development for the R200 line ended with the Catalyst 6.11 drivers for Windows XP.

Mac OS and Mac OS X

Apple never shipped a Radeon 8000 series graphics card with any Power Mac, either stock or BTO, preferring to jump directly from the Radeon 7000 series (which was only available as a BTO option on the Power Mac G4 "Digital Audio") to the Radeon 9000 (as the default graphics card on most Power Mac G4 "Mirrored Drive Doors" models). Instead, various Nvidia cards filled the gap. However, ATI themselves released a retail 8500 Mac Edition, compatible with Mac OS 9.2.2 and Mac OS X and targeted at Mac gamers, but despite the name the card was actually based on the 8500LE with a 250 MHz clock and 64MB of memory.[22]

MorphOS

The R200 series of Radeon graphics cards is supported by MorphOS.

See also

References
  1. "Mesamatrix". mesamatrix.net. Retrieved 2018-04-22.
  2. "RadeonFeature". X.Org Foundation. Retrieved 2018-04-20.
  3. "AMD Radeon HD 6900 (AMD Cayman) series graphics cards". HWlab. hw-lab.com. December 19, 2010. Archived from the original on August 23, 2022. Retrieved August 23, 2022. New VLIW4 architecture of stream processors allowed to save area of each SIMD by 10%, while performing the same compared to previous VLIW5 architecture
  4. "GPU Specs Database". TechPowerUp. Retrieved August 23, 2022.
  5. "NPOT Texture (OpenGL Wiki)". Khronos Group. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
  6. "AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition Beta". AMD. Retrieved 2018-04-20.
  7. "Mesamatrix". mesamatrix.net. Retrieved 2018-04-22.
  8. "RadeonFeature". X.Org Foundation. Retrieved 2018-04-20.
  9. "AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT Specs". TechPowerUp. Retrieved January 1, 2021.
  10. "AMD Launches The Radeon PRO W7500/W7600 RDNA3 GPUs". Phoronix. 3 August 2023. Retrieved 4 September 2023.
  11. "AMD Radeon Pro 5600M Grafikkarte". TopCPU.net (in German). Retrieved 4 September 2023.
  12. Killian, Zak (March 22, 2017). "AMD publishes patches for Vega support on Linux". Tech Report. Retrieved March 23, 2017.
  13. Larabel, Michael (September 15, 2020). "AMD Radeon Navi 2 / VCN 3.0 Supports AV1 Video Decoding". Phoronix. Retrieved January 1, 2021.
  14. Edmonds, Rich (February 4, 2022). "ASUS Dual RX 6600 GPU review: Rock-solid 1080p gaming with impressive thermals". Windows Central. Retrieved November 1, 2022.
  15. "Radeon's next-generation Vega architecture" (PDF). Radeon Technologies Group (AMD). Archived from the original (PDF) on September 6, 2018. Retrieved June 13, 2017.
  16. Larabel, Michael (December 7, 2016). "The Best Features of the Linux 4.9 Kernel". Phoronix. Retrieved December 7, 2016.
  17. Parci (2001-10-30). "ATi Radeon 8500 LE". PROHARDVER! (in Hungarian). Retrieved 2022-12-17.
  18. Bennett, Kyle. Optimizing or Cheating Radeon 8500 Drivers, Hard OCP, October 23, 2001.
  19. ATI RADEON 8500 Extreme Overclocking Experience - X-bit labs Archived 2010-08-10 at the Wayback Machine
  20. Pencil Trick For The ATI Radeon 8500 - PCSTATS.com
  21. "RadeonFeature".
  22. "Inside Mac Games Forum".
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