There are various practical technical reasons for this. prior to the final release of DirectX 8.0, Microsoft decided that it was better to expose the RADEON's and GeForce's extended multitexture capabilities via the extensions to SetTextureStageState() instead of via the pixel shader interface. A forum post by an ATI engineer in 2001 clarified this: R100-based GPUs have forward-looking programmable shading capability in their pipelines however, the chips are not flexible enough to support the Microsoft Direct3D specification for Pixel Shader 1.1. However, the Radeon could close the gap and occasionally outperform its fastest competitor, the GeForce2 GTS, in 32-bit color.Īside from the new 3D hardware, Radeon also introduced per-pixel video- deinterlacing to ATI's HDTV-capable MPEG-2 engine. The performance difference was especially noticeable in 16-bit color, where both the GeForce2 GTS and Voowere far ahead. In terms of performance, Radeon scores lower than the GeForce2 in most benchmarks, even with HyperZ activated. Among the effects are environment-mapped bump mapping, detail textures, glass reflections, mirrors, realistic water simulation, light maps, texture compression, planar reflective surfaces, and portal-based visibility. The Radeon's Ark demo presents a science-fiction environment with heavy use of features such as multiple texture layers for image effects and detail.
Consisting of 3 different functions, it allows the Radeon to perform very competitively compared to competing designs with higher fillrates and bandwidth on paper.ĪTI produced a real-time demo for their new card, to showcase its new features. It basically improves the overall efficiency of the 3D rendering processes. Radeon also introduced a new memory bandwidth optimization and overdraw reduction technology called HyperZ. In terms of rendering, its "Pixel Tapestry" architecture allowed for Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) and Dot Product (Dot3) Bump Mapping support, offering the most complete Bump Mapping support at the time along with the older Emboss method.
Unfortunately, the third texture unit did not get much use in games during the card's lifetime because software was not frequently performing more than dual texturing. As for Radeon's competitors, the GeForce 256 is 4×1, GeForce2 GTS is 4×2 and 3dfx Voois a 2×1+2×1 SLI design.
This is commonly referred to as a 2×3 configuration, or a dual-pipeline design with 3 TMUs per pipe. In 3D rendering the processor can write 2 pixels to the framebuffer and sample 3 texture maps per pixel per clock. Like the GeForce, the Radeon R100 featured a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine to perform geometry calculations, freeing up the host computer's CPU. The R100 was built on a 180 nm semiconductor manufacturing process. The card also had been described as Radeon 256 in the months leading up to its launch, possibly to draw comparisons with the competing Nvidia card, although the moniker was dropped with the launch of the final product.
The first-generation Radeon GPU was launched in 2000, and was initially code-named Rage 6 (later R100), as the successor to ATI's aging Rage 128 Pro which was unable to compete with the GeForce 256. It is the basis for a variety of other succeeding products.ĭevelopment Architecture "R100" refers to the development codename of the initially released GPU of the generation. The processors also include 2D GUI acceleration, video acceleration, and multiple display outputs. The line features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 7.0 and OpenGL 1.3, and all but the entry-level versions offloading host geometry calculations to a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, a major improvement in features and performance compared to the preceding Rage design. The Radeon R100 is the first generation of Radeon graphics chips from ATI Technologies. Pentium 4-M and mobile Pentium 4 (340M IGP, 7000 IGP) Radeon 7500 LE card ( Creative Labs Branded)