Radeon

AMD Radeon, formerly ATI Radeon is a trademark of AMD, are marketed with the graphics cards and graphics chips. In the professional graphics cards AMD FirePro segment the term is used.

History

Since 2000, ATI Technologies calls its new graphics cards and graphics chips off of the market for professional graphics cards " Radeon ", whereas previously the name Rage was used. The last Rage cards provided, however, only a moderate performance and were also plagued by driver problems, so they decided on the new brand name. AMD retained after the acquisition of ATI Technologies in the brand name Radeon. The original part of the company name was introduced with the ATI acquisition as a brand name.

Since the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series ATI brand is no longer used because AMD wants to make the brand portfolio as part of the restructuring clearer. The names Radeon and FireGL are to be retained as AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.

General

Radeon graphics cards are compatible with Macintosh and IBM PC compatible computers.

In addition to desktop models, there is the ATI Mobility Radeon series, which was designed especially for notebook computers and are designed to provide extended by various power saving techniques battery life.

The Radeon graphics cards to compete in the consumer (retail ) market segment mainly with the Geforce series from NVIDIA.

Naming

Radeon graphics cards are available in various model series, which are marked with a four digit number. This is the first digit for the generation of the GPU, where the " X Series " followed the " 9000 series ". It is assumed that the "X" stands for the Roman 10. In the first Radeon generations, the first digit of the supported DirectX version (eg DirectX 9 with Radeon 9700 ) -oriented. This scheme was, however, with the introduction of Radeon 9000 and 9000 Pro ( based on the architecture of the Radeon 8500 and DirectX 8.1 support only ) abandoned for marketing reasons.

With the second and possibly the third digit, the card is then divided into a performance segment. Through various initials performance is then evaluated in more detail. This leads to a very large variety of model names, so it is not always easy to judge which card performs better.

With the successor to the Radeon X1xxx the naming schema has been changed. The "X" at the beginning of the name has been replaced by an " HD" to emphasize the high definition capabilities of the card. With the launch of the HD 3xxx series also, the initials were removed, instead, is now with the first digit of the generation, and given to the second and third digit indicates the power class.

Graphics cards with Radeon chips are - apart from the United States and Canada - almost exclusively produced and distributed by third parties. However, AMD provides so-called " reference designs " are available in which the boards and fan layout is set on a graphics card. This is taken by many manufacturers, so that technically hardly distinguish the many attractions of the individual manufacturer.

Driver

The drivers for Radeon graphics cards are continually developed and are available for Windows and Linux systems ready. Here are the drivers for Windows, which bear the name of AMD Catalyst since the release of the AMD Radeon HD 6000 series, published usually monthly. The ( proprietary, not open source ) drivers for Linux - sometimes still called " fglrx ", in the meantime, AMD uses the name " Catalyst " on Linux - usually appear at the same time points.

For Linux continues to the open source driver " radeon " and " radeonhd " ( DDX ) are available. The " radeon " driver, together with kernel version 3.0 (or newer) Kernel Mode Setting for all current chips from a Linux kernel 2.6.34 ( or later ), many of the power saving features of the Radeon chips are used. Since kernel 3:11 and the Dynamic Power Management (DPM ) is a modern GPUs supported by the kernel, which includes two kernel releases was later activated by default. Both drivers are under the MIT license and are developed as part of the X.Org server.

The 3D acceleration is provided by a DRI module of the Mesa project for all the latest Radeon chips available. For chips from the R300, only the driver based on the Gallium3D infrastructure is further developed. The "classical" drivers for the GPU chipsets R300 - R500 " r300 " (often " r300c " ) and new ( " r600c " ) have been removed in October 2011. The Gallium3D - based driver " r300g " implements OpenGL 2.1 fully. The implementation of higher OpenGL standards for the " r600g " - and the " radeonsi " driver falls below its progress (as of March 2014, the maximum supported by Mesa3D OpenGL Level 3.3 (Core Profile) both by " r600g " and " radeonsi " implemented). The above DDX can be replaced for chips from the R300 with the X.org state tracker for Gallium3D, and this is to be replaced in the future by the XA state tracker. For supported by the " radeonsi " GPUs, the 2D acceleration of the DDX by GLAMOR is provided through the 3D pipeline. In the " r600g " Supported chip is GLAMOR an alternative to EXA.

In addition to pure 3D acceleration DRI modules contained in Mesa3D implement for the Radeon GPUs further acceleration functions, such as the hardware-assisted decoding of video (there are both VDPAU as well as newly supported OpenMAX ) or encoding ( OpenMAX about the video encoding engine in GPUs from the Souther Islands chips). In addition to a matching Mesa version, at least one current kernel and a current version of libdrm is necessary. When " radeonsi " also just adds a dependency on LLVM, since the generation of the hardware commands is performed by a LLVM target.

Since the beginning of September 2007, AMD supports the development of free driver for Radeon graphics cards series.

Tuning

With the " Radeon BIOS editor" there is a freeware tool for editing the BIOS of AMD graphics cards. Can GPU and RAM clock rates and the respective GPU voltage for each mode are set. In addition, the settings of the installed respectively on the graphics card fan can be changed, as well as various other parameters.

GPUs

The graphics processors ( GPUs) to the Radeon products have an identifier of the form Rxxx. In the RVxxx variants techniques are implemented, which reduce production costs (of English value). The RVxxx processors the performance is partially reduced considerably. The numbering is not always chronological and processors with higher numbers do not necessarily have a better graphic performance.

Partially different graphics cards based on the same GPU and be limited only by internal mechanisms, such as pipelines are blocked or reduced clock (see suffixes ). Frequently, different GPUs for the same model may be used - for example, if a newer version of the chip is present and this has been revised.

It should be noted that it is possible all GPUs with native AGP interface used on PCI graphics cards easily. The situation is similar with GPUs with native PCIe interface: This can be used by the bridge chip ATI Rialto for AGP graphics cards. This was mainly used in the time when the graphics card market gradually moved from AGP to PCIe; Today this form of adaptation is no longer meaningful.

Embedded Graphics Processors

AMD also offers graphics processors for the embedded segment. For these models, AMD guarantees long-term availability of five years.

Stream processors

Thanks to the high basic performance in the calculation of floating point numbers, modern GPUs are also suitable for execution of gleitkommalastigen applications. The performance in this specific application surpasses all current x86 processors by far. Starting with the Radeon X1000 series graphics processors can for example take over computing tasks for the project Folding @ home.

Models

Desktop

  • ATI Radeon 7000 series, Radeon Initially, only
  • ATI Radeon 8000 series
  • ATI Radeon 9000 series
  • ATI Radeon X - series
  • ATI Radeon X1000 Series
  • ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series
  • ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series
  • ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series
  • ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series
  • AMD Radeon HD 6000 Series
  • AMD Radeon HD 7000 series
  • AMD Radeon HD 8000 series
  • AMD 's Radeon R200 series

Mobile area

  • ATI Mobility Radeon
  • ATI Mobility Radeon - X2 series
  • ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2000 Series
  • ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 Series
  • ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series
  • ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 Series
  • AMD Radeon HD 6000M Series
  • AMD Radeon HD 7000M Series
  • AMD Radeon HD 8000M Series

Chipsets

AMD also released chipsets with integrated GPUs. These integrated graphics units are marketed under the name " ATI Radeon Xpress ". However, the complete name of the AMD chipsets deviates from the terms of the graphics unit.

Advanced Micro Devices ATI Rage R400 Series Mode-Setting X.Org-Server Direct Rendering Infrastructure Mesa (computer graphics) Accelerated Graphics Port Adapter Embedded system Radeon R100 ATi Radeon R200 series R600 (ASIC) Radeon R700 Evergreen (GPU family) AMD Radeon Rx 200 Series Xpress 200 ATI FireMV ATI FireGL Adreno Xilleon HyperMemory ATI Avivo X-Video Bitstream Acceleration Mantle (API)
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