Technical specs of the RADEON 9800 XT at one glance
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| ATI R360 / RV360 and the new Generation of RADEON Evolution and SOI | |
| (Review by MS, September 30, 2003) |
Summary
Today, ATI announced their new top and mainstream models for the next few months to come. After the somewhat confusing model politics of the 9xxx series, the new models will basically encompass two lines of distinct architecture based on the R360 and the RV360 VPU, respecitvely, that will aim either at the high end or else at the mainstream consumer.
Briefly, the top of the line is going to be the RADEON 9800 XT, based on the R360 engine, an evolutionary development of the R300/R350 line of graphics cores. Like the RADEON 9700 and 9800 series, the RADEON 9800 XT will feature eight pixel shader engines with up to 5 operations per clock for a whopping 40 floating point operations per clock. At 412 MHz this should theoretically result in 16.5 GigaFlops or GigaOps per second, whichever comes first. The entire set of features runs under the name "ATI Extreme Shader Architecture".
Technical specs of the RADEON 9800 XT at one glance
Most improvements over the current state of the art are evolutionary or refinements of the existing technology, that is, a faster core and faster memory. All features of the R350 series will still be supported, that is, long instruction execution improvement by means of the insertion of the F-Buffer or multiple rendering targets to enable different effects on a single shader. On the HyperZ III+ front, there is nothing new either aside from the additional stencil shadowing optimizations that were added with the R350 core.
With respect to cooling, ATI moves away from the standard aminum heat sink solutions and resorts to full copper designs including heatspreaders on the memory devices. According to ATI's briefing, even though the chips themselves do not run very hot, having a heatsink mounted on top will buffer temporal and spatial hot spots and, thus, warrant better reliability of the chips at higher temperature. Because of the enhanced thermal solution, the RADEON 9800XT series will accommodate only a single slot. The fan will be driven by a temperature sensor to enable variable speed depending on load and thermal dissipation.
Architecture of the R360 compared to the NV35
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