De introductie van de nieuwe ATi Radeon 2 zal wel niet lang meer op zich laten wachten, aangezien er steeds meer foto's en gegevens van samplekaartjes op het net 'lekken'. Waren er onlangs foto's te zien van de samples in de Chinese fabriek van ATi, inmiddels heeft de Koreaanse site Brainbox ook een aantal duidelijke foto's en wat interessante gegevens van Radeon 2 samples gepubliceerd, inclusief driverscreenies. X-bit labs heeft de info deels overgenomen en voorzien van engelstalig (en voor ons beter leesbaar) commentaar. De afgebeelde kaart heeft 64MB 4ns DDR SDRAM, wat in principe op 500MHz geklokt zou kunnen worden, al zal ATi dat af fabriek misschien niet direct doen. Het kan wel mooi synchroon lopen met de core die op 250MHz zou werken. Interessant is de schematische lay-out van de kaart, die X-bit becommentarieert:
You can see a couple of curious things if you take a closer look at it. First of all, we should point out the dual-channel 128bit memory interface. We believe that it doesn’t at all imply that the memory bus will be 256bit wide. The memory chips on the card are arranges as 4M x 16, i.e. the memory bus can be only 128bit wide (since there are 8 chips on the card). In other words, ATI can boast some tricky memory access technology, maybe something like a cross-bar controller used in GeForce3. Moreover, there will be a HyperZ II technology aimed at unloading the memory bus. We expect ATI to have improved it compared to the ordinary HyperZ used in regular RADEON cards.
3D engine part shows that there are 4 rendering pipelines in the chip, just as we have expected before. Each pipeline has 2 TMUs. The chart shows clearly that R200 is DirectX 8.1 compliant due to Charisma Engine II and Pixel Tapestry II technologies including programmable vertex and pixel shaders. Besides, R200 3D Engine will also include a well-known N-Patch engine.
Flexible Display Engine shown on the chart allows connecting all sorts of DVI and CRT monitors and well as TV. The same thing can be seen on the photos: the card is equipped with D-sub, DVI-Out and TV-Out. The card photographed also features ATI Rage Theater chip, i.e. some RADEON 2 cards will also have a Video-In. besides, we should also say that the Display Engine allows connecting an optional external DAC. In other words, dual-monitor support can be implemented on R200 based cards, unlike GeForce3, which can’t boast any dual-monitor support.
![]() |