LOSTCIRCUITS

Tyan Tachyon G9000 Pro

The second card we are looking at in more detail is the Tyan Tachyon 9000Pro. Briefly, for those who either never bothered or else forgot the details since they read about them, the RADEON 9000 GPU is a simplified version of the RADEON 8500 (R200) with only one texturing unit per pixel pipeline but the capability of looping 6 times / pass instead of the two texturing units on the 8500 with their limitation of 3 textures / pass. This means that the 9000 can still apply 6 textures per pass but it affects the peak fill rate in multi texturing applications, as a matter of fact, the theoretical fillrate is only ½ of what the RADEON 8500 delivers.

Tyan Tachyon G9000 Pro, featuring 64 MB of 4Mx16 Hynix 3.3ns DDR. The Tachyon like ATI's own version of the card uses TSOP memory packaging which is robust enough to withstand clock rates of up to 300 MHz. The Tachyon is running the core at 275 MHz and the memory at 550 MHz data rate which gives it specs identical to the 9000 Pro made by ATI.

Standard VGA, DFP and S-video out, if you paid attention, you noticed that the VGA and DFP connectors are in the opposite arrangement from what we showed for the Xabre600. Tyan further bundles an s-video cable, an s-video-to-composite converter and a composite video cable with the Tachyon.

As with all versions of the ATi 9000 (Pro), also the Tachyon supports all advanced features from HydraVision (dual monitor support) to Video ImmersionII and Fullstream deblocking of video streams and MPEG-2 decoding. On the image quality side of things, we have ATIs SMARTSHADER with up to 6 textures per rendering pass (2 x 3 texture loops) , SMOOTHVISION and TRUFORM, all of which are made possible by the ATI CHARISMA ENGINE II

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