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ATI Radeon 200 debuts on Web

Spex, pix....

ATI's upcoming R200 chip - almost certainly to ship as the Radeon 2 - has appeared on the Web over at Korean site Brainbox, which has details and piccies of an engineering sample AGP 4x board based on the new graphics processor.

The site's information shows the R200 to be fabbed at 0.15 micron. ATI's board contains 64MB of 128Mb 4ns DDR SDRAM clocked at up to 480MHz or 500MHz, with the R200 itself running at 240MHz or 250MHz. Single-rate memory is also supported across what an ATI R200 architecture diagram calls a "dual-channel" memory bus.

As expected, the R200 provides four rendering pipelines, and contains second-generation Pixel Tapestry and Charisma Engine pixel and vertex shaders. Essentially, both take the original Radeon engines into the DirectX 8 era by adding programmability.

ATI has already announced that it will support the next DirectX update, version 8.1, with a technology called SmartShader, but it hasn't yet said that SmartShader - essentially Pixel Tapestry II and Charisma Engine II - will ship in the R200. However, that's what information leaking out of ATI has suggested in the past, and the latest leak confirms it.

Equally, while ATI has already announced its Truform N-Patch mesh manipulation technology, it hasn't explicitly said it will be part of the R200. Again, Brainbox's leaked architecture chart shows that Truform will indeed ship with the next-generation Radeon.

The R200 also supports TV, CRT and digital LCD output, courtesy of its HydraVision technology. Pictures of the sample board show the presence of ATI's Radeon Theater chip, suggesting that the boards will also offer video digitisation support.

The R200 is sampling now and expected to ship in September. ®

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Brainbox: ATI's R200

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