ATi Radeon R300 Series

R300 redirects here. For other uses, see R300 (disam- clock speed gain.
biguation). One major change with the manufacturing of the core was
the use of the ip-chip packaging, a technology not used
The R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and devel- previously on video cards. Flip chip packaging allows
oped by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU far better cooling of the die by ipping it and exposing
used in Radeon graphics cards. This GPU features 3D it directly to the cooling solution. ATI thus could achieve
acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, higher clock speeds. Radeon 9700 PRO was launched
a major improvement in features and performance com- clocked at 325 MHz, ahead of the originally projected
pared to the preceding R200 design. R300 was the rst 300 MHz. With a transistor count of 110 million, it was
fully Direct3D 9-capable consumer graphics chip. The the largest and most complex GPU of the time. A slower
processors also include 2D GUI acceleration, video ac- chip, the 9700, was launched a few months later, dier-
celeration, and multiple display outputs. ing only by lower core and memory speeds. Despite that,
The rst graphics cards using the R300 to be released the Radeon 9700 PRO was clocked signicantly higher
were the Radeon 9700. It was the rst time that ATI than the Matrox Parhelia 512, a card released but months
marketed its GPU as a Visual Processing Unit (VPU). before R300 and considered to be the pinnacle of graph-
R300 and its derivatives would form the basis for ATIs ics chip manufacturing (with 80 million transistors at 220
consumer and professional product lines for over 3 years. MHz), up until R300s arrival.
The integrated graphics processor based upon R300 is the
Xpress 200. 1.1 Architecture

Radeon 9700 (R300 "khan")

256-bit Quad Channel
AGP 8
DDR memory interface
1 Development
Vertex
Processing 2D
ATI had held the lead for a while with the Radeon 8500 Engine Engine

but Nvidia retook the performance crown with the launch

Setup Engine
of the GeForce 4 Ti line. A new high-end refresh part,
Video
the 8500XT (R250) was supposedly in the works, ready Processing
Unit 3D HyperZ
to compete against NVIDIAs high-end oerings, partic- Rendering III
Engine
ularly the top line Ti 4600. Pre-release information listed Display
Interface
a 300 MHz core and RAM clock speed for the R250 chip.
ATI, perhaps mindful of what had happened to 3dfx when Smoothvision 2.0
anti-aliasing unit

they took focus o their Rampage processor, abandoned

it in favor of nishing o their next-generation R300 card.
This proved to be a wise move, as it enabled ATI to
take the lead in development for the rst time instead
of trailing NVIDIA. The R300, with its next-generation
architecture giving it unprecedented features and perfor-
mance, would have been superior to any R250 refresh.
The R3xx chip was designed by ATIs West Coast team
(formerly ArtX Inc.), and the rst product to use it was the
Radeon 9700 PRO (internal ATI code name: R300; in-
ternal ArtX codename: Khan), launched in August 2002.
The architecture of R300 was quite dierent from its pre-
decessor, Radeon 8500 (R200), in nearly every way. The
core of 9700 PRO was manufactured on a 150 nm chip
fabrication process, similar to the Radeon 8500. How-
ever, rened design and manufacturing techniques en-
abled a doubling of transistor count and a signicant
Block diagram of the R300 chip.
The chip adopted an architecture consisting of 8 pixel
pipelines, each with 1 texture mapping unit (an 8x1 de-
sign). While this diered from the older chips using 2 (or
3 for the original Radeon) texture units per pipeline, this
did not mean R300 could not perform multi-texturing as
eciently as older chips. Its texture units could perform
a new loopback operation which allowed them to sample
up to 16 textures per geometry pass. The textures can be
any combination of one, two, or three dimensions with
bilinear, trilinear, or anisotropic ltering. This was part
of the new DirectX 9 specication, along with more exi-
ble oating-point-based Shader Model 2.0+ pixel shaders
and vertex shaders. Equipped with 4 vertex shader units,

1
2 1
ATI R300 GPU
R300 possessed over twice the geometry processing capa-
bility of the preceding Radeon 8500 and the GeForce4 Ti
4600, in addition to the greater feature-set oered com-
pared to DirectX 8 shaders.
ATI demonstrated part of what was capable with pixel
shader PS2.0 with their Rendering with Natural Light
demo. The demo was a real-time implementation of
noted 3D graphics researcher Paul Debevec's paper on
the topic of high dynamic range rendering.[1] A note-
worthy limitation is that all R300-generation chips were
designed for a maximum oating point precision of 96-
bit, or FP24, instead of DirectX 9s maximum of 128-
bit FP32. DirectX 9.0 specied FP24 as a minimum
level for conforming to the specication for full precision.
This trade-o in precision oered the best combination
of transistor usage and image quality for the manufac-
turing process at the time. It did cause a usually visibly
imperceptible loss of quality when doing heavy blending.
ATIs Radeon chips did not go above FP24 until R520.
ATIs Rendering with Natural Light promo demo
The R300 was the rst board to truly take advantage of a The performance and quality increases oered by the
256-bit memory bus. Matrox had released their Parhelia R300 GPU are considered to be one of the greatest
DEVELOPMENT
512 several months earlier, but this board did not show
great gains with its 256-bit bus. ATI, however, had not
only doubled their bus to 256-bit, but also integrated an
advanced crossbar memory controller, somewhat simi-
lar to NVIDIA's memory technology. Utilizing four in-
dividual load-balanced 64-bit memory controllers, ATIs
memory implementation was quite capable of achieving
high bandwidth eciency by maintaining adequate gran-
ularity of memory transactions and thus working around
memory latency limitations. R300 was also given the
latest renement of ATIs innovative HyperZ memory
bandwidth and llrate saving technology, HyperZ III. The
demands of the 8x1 architecture required more band-
width than the 128-bit bus designs of the previous gen-
eration due to having double the texture and pixel llrate.
Radeon 9700 introduced ATIs multi-sample gamma-
corrected anti-aliasing scheme. The chip oered sparse-
sampling in modes including 2, 4, and 6. Multi-
sampling oered vastly superior performance over the
supersampling method on older Radeons, and superior
image quality compared to NVIDIAs oerings at the
time. Anti-aliasing was, for the rst time, a fully us-
able option even in the newest and most demanding titles
of the day. The R300 also oered advanced anisotropic
ltering which incurred a much smaller performance hit
than the anisotropic solution of the GeForce4 and other
competitors cards, while oering signicantly improved
quality over Radeon 8500s anisotropic ltering imple-
mentation which was highly angle dependent.
On March 14, 2008, AMD released the 3D Register Ref-
erence for R3xx.[2]
1.2 Performance
Radeon 9700s architecture was very ecient and much
more advanced compared to its peers of 2002. Under
normal conditions it beat the GeForce4 Ti 4600, the pre-
vious top-end card, by 1520%. However, when anti-
aliasing (AA) and/or anisotropic ltering (AF) were en-
abled it would beat the Ti 4600 by anywhere from 40
100%. At the time, this was quite special, and resulted in
the widespread acceptance of AA and AF as truly usable
features.[3]
Besides advanced architecture, reviewers also took note
of ATIs change in strategy. The 9700 would be the
second of ATIs chips (after the 8500) to be shipped to
third-party manufacturers instead of ATI producing all of
its graphics cards, though ATI would still produce cards
o of its highest-end chips. This freed up engineering
resources that were channeled towards driver improve-
ments, and the 9700 performed phenomenally well at
launch because of this. id Software technical director
John Carmack had the Radeon 9700 run the E3 Doom
3 demonstration.[4]
2.1 Refreshed
in the history of 3D graphics, alongside the achieve-
ments GeForce 256 and Voodoo Graphics. Furthermore,
NVIDIAs response in the form of the GeForce FX 5800
was both late to market and somewhat unimpressive, es-
pecially when pixel shading was used. R300 would be-
come one of the GPUs with the longest useful lifetime in
history, allowing playable performance in new games at
least 3 years after its launch.[5]
2 Further releases
A few months later, the 9500 and 9500 PRO were
launched. The 9500 PRO had half the memory bus width
of the 9700 PRO, and the 9500 was also missing (dis-
abled) half the pixel processing units and the hierarchi-
cal Z-buer optimization unit (part of HyperZ III). With
its full 8 pipelines and ecient architecture, the 9500
PRO outperformed all of NVIDIAs products (save the
Ti 4600). Meanwhile, the 9500 also became popular be-
cause it could in some cases be modied into the much
more powerful 9700. ATI only intended for the 9500 se-
ries to be a temporary solution to ll the gap for the 2002
Christmas season, prior to the release of the 9600. Since
all of the R300 chips were based on the same physical
die, ATIs margins on 9500 products were low. Radeon
9500 was one of the shortest-lived product of ATI, later
replaced by the Radeon 9600 series. The logo and box
package of the 9500 was resurrected in 2004 to market
the unrelated and slower Radeon 9550 (which is a deriva-
tive of the 9600).
2.1 Refreshed
In early 2003, the 9700 cards were replaced by the 9800
(or, R350). These were R300s with higher clock speeds,
and improvements to the shader units and memory con-
troller which enhanced anti-aliasing performance. They
were designed to maintain a performance lead over the
recently launched GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, which it man-
aged to do without diculty. The 9800 still held its own
against the revised FX 5900, primarily (and signicantly)
in tasks involving heavy SM2.0 pixel shading. Another
selling point for the 9800 was that it was still a single-slot
card, compared to the dual-slot requirements of the FX
5800 and FX 5900. A later version of the 9800 Pro with
256 MiB of memory used GDDR2. The other two vari-
ants were the 9800, which was simply a lower-clocked
9800 Pro, and the 9800 SE, which had half the pixel
processing units disabled (could sometimes be enabled
again). Ocial ATI specications dictate a 256-bit mem-
ory bus for the 9800 SE, but most of the manufacturers
used a 128-bit bus. Usually, the 9800 SE with 256-bit
memory bus was called 9800 SE Ultra or 9800 SE
Golden Version.
Alongside the 9800, the 9600 (a.k.a. RV350) series was
3
rolled out in early 2003, and while the 9600 PRO didn't
outperform the 9500 PRO that it was supposed to replace,
it was much more economical for ATI to produce by way
of a 130 nm process (all ATIs cards since the 7500/8500
had been 150 nm) and a simplied design. Radeon 9600s
RV350 core was basically a 9800 Pro cut in half, with ex-
actly half of the same functional units, making it a 41
architecture with 2 vertex shaders. It also lost part of Hy-
perZ III with the removal of the hierarchical z-buer op-
timization unit, the same as Radeon 9500. Using a 130
nm process was also good for pushing up the core clock
speed. The 9600 series, all with high default clocking,
was shown to have quite a bit of headroom by overclock-
ers (achieving over 500 MHz, from 400 MHz on the Pro
model). While the 9600 series was less powerful than
the 9500 and 9500 Pro it replaced, it did largely manage
to maintain the 9500s lead over NVIDIAs GeForce FX
5600 Ultra, and it was ATIs cost-eective answer to the
long-time mainstream performance board, GeForce4 Ti
4200.
During the summer of 2003, the Mobility Radeon 9600
was launched, based upon the RV350 core. Being the
rst laptop chip to oer DirectX 9.0 shaders, it enjoyed
the same success of the previous Mobility Radeons. The
Mobility Radeon 9600 was originally planned to use a
RAM technology called GDDR2-M. The company de-
veloping that memory went bankrupt and the RAM never
arrived, so ATI was forced to use regular DDR SDRAM.
Undoubtedly there would have been power usage savings,
and perhaps performance gains with GDDR2-M. In fall
2004, a slightly faster variant, the Mobility Radeon 9700
was launched (which was still based upon the RV350, and
not the older R300 of the desktop Radeon 9700 despite
the naming similarity).
Later in 2003, three new cards were launched: the 9800
XT (R360), the 9600 XT (RV360), and the 9600 SE
(RV350). The 9800 XT was slightly faster than the
9800 PRO had been, while the 9600 XT competed well
with the newly launched GeForce FX 5700 Ultra.[6] The
RV360 chip on 9600 XT was the rst graphics chip by
ATI that utilized Low-K chip fabrication and allowed
even higher clocking of the 9600 core (500 MHz default).
The 9600 SE was ATIs answer to NVIDIAs GeForce
FX 5200 Ultra, managing to outperform the 5200 while
also being cheaper. Another RV350 board followed in
early 2004, on the Radeon 9550, which was a Radeon
9600 with a lower core clock (though an identical mem-
ory clock and bus width).
Worthy of note regarding the R300-based generation is
that the entire lineup utilized single-slot cooling solutions.
It was not until the R420 generations Radeon X850 XT
Platinum Edition, in December 2004, that ATI would
adopt an ocial dual-slot cooling design.[7]
4 5 EXTERNAL LINKS

2.2 New interface 5 External links

Also in 2004, ATI released the Radeon X300 and X600
boards. These were based on the RV370 (110 nm pro-
cess) and RV380 (130 nm Low-K process) GPU respec-
tively. They were nearly identical to the chips used in
Radeon 9550 and 9600, only diering in that they were
native PCI Express oerings. These were very popular
for Dell and other OEM companies to sell in various con-
gurations; connectors: DVI vs. DMS-59, card height:
full-height vs. half-height.
Later the Radeon X550 was launched, using the same
chip as Radeon X300 graphics card (RV370).
3 Models
3D Chip and Board Charts, by Beyond3D, retrieved
January 10, 2006
ATIs Radeon 9700 (R300) Crowning the New
King, by Anand Lal Shimpi, Anandtech, July 18,
2002, retrieved January 10, 2006
ATI Radeon 9700 PRO Review, by Dave Baumann,
Beyond3D, August 19, 2002, retrieved January 10,
2006
Matroxs Parhelia - A Performance Paradox, by
Anand Lal Shimpi, Anandtech, June 25, 2002, re-
trieved January 10, 2006
Infos zur ALDI Grakkarte Radeon 9800 XXL (in
German), Infos about ALDI graphic card Radeon
9800 XXL, retrieved November 21, 2006

AMD Radeon R3xx 3D Register Reference Guide

techPowerUp! GPU Database

Ati Radeon 9800XXL

Main article: Comparison of ATI Graphics Processing

Units

4 References
[1] Debevec, Paul. Rendering with Natural Light, Authors
web page, 1998

[2] Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Radeon R3xx 3D Register

Reference Guide, X.org website, March 14, 2008.

[3] High-end Graphics Card Overview, By Punit Lodaya, Jan

14 2005, Techtree.com India

[4] IGN Advertisement

[5] Weinand, Lars. VGA Charts VII: AGP Update Summer

2005, Toms Hardware, July 5, 2005.

[6] Gasior, Geo. NVIDIAs GeForce FX 5700 Ultra GPU:

Third times the charm?, The Tech Report, October 23,
2003.

[7] Wasson, Scott. ATIs Radeon X850 XT graphics cards:

Canadian double-wide?, The Tech Report, December 1,
2004.
 5

6 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

6.1 Text
ATi Radeon R300 Series Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATi_Radeon_R300_Series?oldid=780628532 Contributors: Michael
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J.delanoy, VolkovBot, Sarenne, Rei-bot, The nnoob, LaptopGun, Permacultura, 718 Bot, Mewtu, DumZiBoT, Addbot, Tide rolls, Matthew
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6.2 Images
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tributors:
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