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#Post#: 16--------------------------------------------------
ATI
DIR By: Mr Horse
Date: December 17, 2017, 2:18 pm
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ATi Wonder Series
The ATi Wonder series represents some of the first graphics add
on products for IBM PCs and compatibles introduced by ATi
Technologies in the mid to late 1980s. These cards were unique
at the time as they offered the end user a considerable amount
of value by combining support for multiple graphics standards
(and monitors) into a single card. The VGA Wonder series added
additional value with the inclusion of a bus mouse port, which
normally required the installation of a dedicated Microsoft Bus
Mouse adapter.
The VGA Wonder series later merged with the ATI Mach series of
cards in 1990. The ATi Graphics Ultra (VRAM) and ATi Graphics
Vantage (DRAM) cards both featured independent VGA Wonder ASICs
in addition to their Mach8 8514 compatible coprocessor chips.
The Graphics Ultra was later renamed the VGA Wonder GT. In 1992,
their following product line, the Mach32, integrated the VGA
wonder core and coprocessor into a single IC. At this point the
VGA Wonder line was cancelled and replaced with a cost reduced
DRAM based version of Mach32 known as the "ATi Graphics Wonder".
Graphics Solution (CGA)
File:ATI Hercules Card 1986.xcf
One of the early graphics cards from ATI Technologies: a
Graphics Solution Rev 3 Hercules graphics card from 1986. As can
be seen from the PCB the layout was done in 1985, whereas the
marking on the central chip CW16800-A says "8639" meaning that
chip was manufactured week 39, 1986.
Release Date: 1986
ATi Graphics Solution Rev 3
Chipset: ATI CW16800-A
Supports: Hercules Graphics Card mode
Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
ATi Color Emulation Card
Did at least support CGA graphics output to a TTL Monochrome
monitor
ATi Graphics Solution plus (1987)
Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
Supports CGA, Plantronics Colorplus CGA & Hercules Graphics
Card graphics modes
Compatible with MDA, CGA (and therefore also EGA displays),
DIP switch selectable
64kb of DRAM
Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
Graphics Solution Plus SP
Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
Adds Serial/Parallel Ports
Graphics Solution SR
Chipset: ATI CW16800-B
Uses Static RAM
ATi Small Wonder Graphics Solution (1988)
Chipset: ATI 18700
Also known as Graphics Solution Single Chip or just GS-SC
Single-chip version of the Graphics Solution plus
64kb of static RAM
Composite Output
Graphics Solution Single Chip or GS-SC with Game (1988)
Includes a game port
Lacks external composite connector
EGA Wonder
Release Date: 1987
ATi EGA Wonder (March 1987)
Chipset: ATI16899-0 + CHIPS P86C435
Supports CGA, Hercules mono & EGA graphics modes
Removes support for plantronics mode/Single-page Hercules
mode/composite output
Compatible with MDA, CGA and EGA displays (DIP switch
selectable)
Internal composite port for machines such as IBM 5155
Portable
256kb DRAM
Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
Original MSRP: $399
ATi EGA Wonder 800
Added support for extended EGA text and graphics modes
(requires multisync monitor)
Added support for 16-colour VGA modes
ATi EGA Wonder 800+
Rebadged VGA Edge lacking the analogue VGA port
Chipset: ATI 18800
Can auto-detect monitor type connected (DIP switches no
longer present)
VGA Wonder
Release Date: 1987
ATi VIP or VGA Improved Performance (1987)
Chipset: ATi 16899-0 & Chips P82C441
Supports CGA, Hercules mono, EGA & VGA graphics with
Softsense automatic mode switching
Compatible with MDA, CGA, EGA and VGA displays (DIP switch
selectable)
9-pin TTL and 15-pin analogue connectors
256kb DRAM
Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
Original MSRP: $449 ($99 for Compaq expansion module)
ATi VGA Wonder (1988)
Chipset: ATI 18800
Adds support for SVGA graphics modes
Adds support for monitor auto-sensing (switchless
configuration)
Uses on-board EEPROM to store configuration information
256kb or 512kb DRAM
Port: 8-bit PC/XT bus
ATi VGA Edge 8
Cost Reduced VGA Wonder
256KB DRAM
ATi VGA Wonder 16 (1988)
Speed enhancements due to a wider bus
VGA pass through connector
Bus mouse connector
256KB or 512KB DRAM
Port: 16-bit PC/AT bus (ISA), 8-bit compatible
Original MSRP: $499 or $699 respectively
ATi VGA Edge-16
Cost reduced VGA Wonder 16
Lacks the bus mouse connector and the digital TTL output
256kb DRAM (not expandable to 512kb)
ATi VGA Wonder+ (1990)
File:ATI Wonder.jpg
ATI VGA Wonder+
Chipset: ATI 28800-2, -4, or -5
Based on a new chipset which claimed to offer speeds
rivalling VRAM based cards
Dual page mode memory access
Dynamic CPU/CRT interleaving
256KB or 512KB DRAM
ATi VGA Integra (1990)
Cost reduced version based on new ATi 28800 ASIC
Lacks bus mouse connector
Uses a much smaller PCB with a surface mount BIOS & RAMDAC
Supports SVGA Graphics with 72 Hz refresh rates
512KB DRAM
ATi VGA Basic-16 (1990)
PCB layout similar to VGA Integra but using cheaper RAMDAC
Only supports the basic 60 Hz VGA modes of the IBM VGA
standard from 1987
256KB DRAM (not upgradable)
ATi VGA Charger (1991)
Similar to VGA Basic-16, but can be upgraded to 512KB
ATi VGA Wonder XL (May 1991)
Sierra RAMDAC adds support for 15-bit colour in 640x480@72
Hz, 800x600@60 Hz
Supports a flicker-free vertical refresh rate of 72 Hz
256KB, 512KB or 1MB DRAM
Original MSRP: $229, $349, $399 respectively
ATi VGA Stereo·F/X
File:Vgafx.JPG
ATi VGA Stereo·F/X
Chipset: ATI 28800
Combines a VGA Wonder XL with a Sound Blaster 1.5
Features "fake" stereo sound
512KB or 1MB DRAM
ATi VGA Wonder XL24 (1992)
Contains a Brooktree Bt481KPJ85 RAMDAC that adds support for
hi and true colour graphics modes
512KB or 1MB DRAM
ATi VGA Wonder 1024
A series of OEM cost reduced versions of several VGA Wonder
models
Typically lacks the bus mouse connector and/or the digital
TTL output
ATi Mach series
The ATi Mach line was a series of 2D graphics accelerators for
personal computers developed by ATI Technologies. It became an
extension (and eventual successor) to the ATI Wonder series of
cards. The first chip in the series was the ATi Mach8. It was
essentially a clone of the IBM 8514/A with a few notable
extensions such as Crystal fonts. Being one of the first
graphics accelerator chips on the market, the Mach8 did not have
an integrated VGA core. In order to use the first Mach8
coprocessor cards, a separate VGA card was required. This made
ownership considerably expensive. A temporary solution was
presented with the ATi Graphics Ultra/Vantage cards, which
combined an ATi 8514 Ultra and VGA Wonder+ into a single card
(though using discrete ICs). The Mach32 chip was the follow-up
to the Mach8, which finally featured an integrated VGA core,
true colour support and a 64-bit datapath to internal memory.
Mach 8
Released: 1990
IBM 8514/A clone
Support for up to 8-bit color modes
Optional VGAWonder 2 (28800) graphics core (with dedicated
256–512 KB DRAM)
512 KB or 1 MB available with either DRAM or VRAM
Port: ISA, MCA
The Mach 8 chip was used on the following ATI products:
8514 Ultra (VRAM, coprocessor only)
8514 Vantage (DRAM, coprocessor only)
Graphics Vantage (DRAM)
Graphics Ultra (VRAM)
VGAWonder GT (Repackaged Graphics Ultra, 1 MB RAM standard)
Mach 32
Released: 1992
32-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
Limited VESA VBE support
Support for 15 bbp, 16 bbp and 24 bbp colour modes added
Video memory: 1 or 2 MB DRAM or VRAM
Memory interface: 64-bit
Port: ISA, EISA, VLB, PCI, MCA
Integrated VGA core
100% compatible with IBM 8514/A
The Mach 32 chip was used on the following ATI products:
Graphics Wonder (DRAM)
Graphics Ultra + (DRAM, fast RAMDAC)
Graphics Ultra CLX (DRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
Graphics Ultra Pro (VRAM)
Graphics Ultra XLR (VRAM, cost-reduced OEM version)
Mach 64
Released: 1994
64-bit GUI accelerator with basic DOS support
Limited VESA VBE support
Video memory: 1, 2, 4 or 8 MB DRAM, VRAM, or SGRAM
Memory interface: 64-bit
Port: ISA, VLB, PCI
Variants:
"Mach64 CX/210888" - Original chipset, uncommon (up to 2
MB DRAM, or 4 MB VRAM)
"Mach64 GX/210888GX" - Enhanced video playback
capabilities
"Mach64 ET/210888ET" - Embedded???
"Mach64 CT/264CT - Cost-reduced Mach64 with integrated
RAMDAC and clock chip (up to 2 MB DRAM)
"Mach64 VT/264VT - AMC connector (Support for TV-tuner)
"Mach64 GT/264GT 3D Rage" - 3D capabilities
"Mach64 GT-B/264GT-B 3D Rage II - SDRAM & SGRAM
support(up to 8 MB)
"Mach64 LT/264LT" - Low-power mobile version of Mach64
GT
The Mach 64 chip was used on the following ATI products:
Several Mach64 PCI graphics cards
Mach64 PCI made by ASUS
Mach64 GX Family:
Graphics Xpression (1 or 2 MB DRAM)
Graphics Pro Turbo (2 or 4 MB VRAM)
WinTurbo (1 or 2 MB VRAM, non-upgradable)
Graphics Pro Turbo 1600 (fast RAMDAC,PCI-only)
XCLAIM GA (Macintosh)
Mach64 CT Family:
WinBoost (1 MB DRAM, upgradable to 2mb)
WinCharger (2 MB DRAM)
Mach64 VT Family:
Video Charger
Video Xpression (Mach64 VT2)
Video Xpression+ (Mach64 VT4)
Mach64 GT Family:
3D Xpression (2 MB EDO DRAM))
Mach64 GT-B Family:
3D Charger (2 MB EDO DRAM)
3D XPRESSION+ (2 or 4 MB SDRAM)
3D XPRESSION+ PC2TV (TV-out)
3D Pro Turbo (2, 4, 6 or 8 MB SGRAM)
3D Pro Turbo+ PC2TV (TV-out)
Xclaim VR - early versions (Macintosh, 2, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM,
Video-In Video-Out)
Xclaim 3D - early versions (Macintosh, 4 or 8 MB SGRAM)
All-In-Wonder (SDRAM, TV Tuner)
Important Note: The 3D Rage and 3D Rage II chips were also known
as Mach64 GT and Mach64 GT-B respectively. The Mach64 moniker
was eliminated with introduction of the 3D Rage Pro.
ATi Rage series
Rage 3D II PCI
Rage LT Pro
Rage 128 Pro OEM
Rage 128 16MB
3D Rage
3D Rage II
3D Rage Pro
Released in the latter half of 1997, the Rage Pro was a major
improvement on ATI's previous Rage II chip. Improvements include
an increased texture cache size (now at 4 KB) allowing for
improved texture filtering, as well as an integrated triangle
setup engine. It is the first ATI chip (and among the earliest
graphics chips) to fully support AGP bus features, including
execute mode (AGP texturing). It is also the first ATI chip to
support OpenGL in hardware. However, like the previous Rage
chips, the Rage Pro cannot bilinear filter alpha textures,
resulting in transparent textures still having a rough
appearance. Performance-wise, it is very similar to 3Dfx's
original Voodoo Graphics chipset. The Rage Pro was very popular
with OEMs and up until the late 2000s, it was integrated into
many server motherboards.
The Rage Pro is also the last chip to support ATI's CIF
application programming interface. It is also ATI's last chip
with Windows 3.1x support.
Rage 128
ATi Radeon series
R100
Radeon 7200
Radeon 7000 32MB DDR PCI
Radeon 7500 64MB
The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit
(VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3
texture units on each of the pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon
DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR. Clock speeds
varied from 143 - 200 MHz, synchronous memory and core.
It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce
cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering
that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement
but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same
time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid
supersampling anti-aliasing.
Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because
of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It
is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was
not officially supported.
RV100 (Radeon VE / 7000) is a chip with dual display
capabilities but with reduced 3D hardware. It lacks T&L and has
a single pixel pipeline. It is somewhat faster than TNT2 Ultra
and G400 Max.
RV200 (Radeon 7500) is a die shrink of R100 with some
improvements. It has more anisotropic filtering options and is
capable of asynchronous clocking of memory and the core. The top
of the line model is clocked at 290 MHz core and 230 MHz RAM,
and competes with GeForce 2 Ti/Pro. There are many variations of
this card.
Notes:
DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with
DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
R200
Radeon 8500 128MB
This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance,
actually Direct3D 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design
with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz,
typically with synchronous core and RAM. It is competitive with
GeForce 3 Ti 500.
A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are
available (2-6x, quality/performance). ATi calls it
"Smoothvision". It uses various techniques, including a
jittered-grid pattern for some modes/cases and ordered-grid for
others. In Direct3D, fog may force it to use ordered-grid.
Drivers vary in their behavior as well.[1]
Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels
supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work
with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality
anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.
ATi introduced a tessellation function called TruForm.
Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because
of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.
RV250 and RV280, known as Radeon 9000, 9200 and 9250, are slight
evolutions of the design. They have somewhat reduced
specifications but are more efficient and run cooler. They were
popular notebook GPUs. Performance of Radeon 9000 Pro is not far
off of Radeon 8500. Radeon 9100 is a rename of Radeon 8500 LE.
Notes:
DVI on these cards is flaky and is essentially unusable with
DOS. High resolutions may also be problematic.
With Star Wars KOTOR, use Catalyst 4.2. For KOTOR2, use
Catalyst 5.1. These drivers should enable all effects and
perform well.
R300
Radeon 9500 Pro 128MB
Radeon 9600 256MB
Radeon 9800 XL 128MB
Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
Introduced in August 2002, the R300 GPUs are Direct3D
9.0-compliant graphics chips. R300 introduced Shader Model 2.0
support and is also OpenGL 2.0-compliant. The R300 was designed
by the ArtX engineering team that ATI had acquired in Feburary
2000. The same ArtX engineers (who were also former SGI
employees) designed the Nintendo Gamecube GPU (Flipper) as well
as the SGI RealityEngine-based graphics processor in the
Nintendo 64. The first R300-based cards released were the Radeon
9500 and 9700 line of cards. In 2003, the Radeon 9600 and 9800
series were added to the lineup. R300 has many improvements and
noticeably better visual quality than ATI's prior chips. Radeon
9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with
Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.
Anisotropic filtering quality is vastly improved in the R300,
with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work
simultaneously with trilinear filtering. Furthermore, compared
to its initial competitor, NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti series, R300's
anisotropic filtering incurred much less performance decrease.
Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected
rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on
polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within
textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less
fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does
not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi
did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while
NVIDIA did.
The R300 enjoyed visual quality and performance supremacy over
its competitors in games and applications that extensively used
Shader Model 2.0. NVIDIA would not be able to match or exceed
ATI's Direct3D 9.0 performance until the release of the GeForce
6 series in 2004.
Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because
of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.
Also, despite being Direct3D 9.0-compliant, the R300 is not
officially supported under Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D
and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use the Windows
Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features
will not be present.
Notes:
With Star Wars KOTOR and KOTOR2, use Catalyst 4.2.
With Star Wars KOTOR, use Catalyst 4.2. For KOTOR2, use
Catalyst 5.1. These drivers should enable all effects and
perform well.
R400
Radeon X600 Pro 256MB
Radeon X800 XT PE
Introduced in 2004, this is ATi's Direct3D 9.0b generation. It
is very similar to R300 in general, but with 16 pipelines in the
top chip instead of 8, and higher clock speeds. They are still
shader model 2.0 GPUs but have some extensions beyond 2.0, which
gives them a 2.0b designation, but are not 3.0 compliant. This
was not an issue until about 2 years after launch when games
started to outright require shader model 3.0 or run without some
visual features. There are some games that utilize 2.0b features
- for example Oblivion has more visual effects available on X800
than 9800.
A new anti-aliasing mode was introduced, called temporal AA.
This feature shifts the sampling pattern on a per-frame basis,
if the card can maintain >= 60 fps. This works well with human
vision and gives a tangible improvement to anti-aliasing
quality. Also, while not initially available, adaptive
anti-aliasing was added to the R400 series after the release of
R500 series. Adaptive AA anti-aliases within transparent
textures, giving MSAA more SSAA-like capabilities.
The ATI R400 series are ATI's last GPUs with official Windows
98/98 SE/ME support. Likewise with the R300 series, the R400
series is not officially supported under Windows 7. However, for
full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is still possible to use
the Windows Vista driver instead under Windows 7, although WDDM
1.1 features will not be present.
R500
Introduced in 2005, the Radeon X1000 / R500 series are ATI's
first Direct3D 9.0c-compliant GPUs with full Shader Model 3.0
features. The R500 series is not officially supported under
Windows 7. However, for full Direct3D and OpenGL support, it is
still possible to use the Windows Vista driver instead under
Windows 7, although WDDM 1.1 features will not be present.
R600
HD 2600Pro and HD 2600XT, AGP versions
HD 3850 AGP
Introduced in 2006, these Radeons added the "HD" prefix to their
names. R600 includes both the HD 2xxx and HD 3xxx series, with
the AGP version of the HD 3850 arguably being the most powerful
AGP graphics card to ever have been made (with only the AGP
variants of the HD 4650 and the HD 4670 being of a more recent
GPU family).
R700
HD 4670 1GB Club3D AGP
Introduced in 2008, the R700 family included the last graphics
cards to be made for AGP slots.
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