Introduction

ATI's new Radeon HD 2900 or "R600" is probably the most hyped (and delayed) product of 2006 and 2007. The card uses the brand-new R600 GPU which is the first ATI product that has been specifically designed for DirectX10 and Windows Vista.

Here are all the specs at a glance, for further reference see our upcoming Radeon HD 2000 Series article.

Full Specifications

• 700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process
• 512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface

Ring Bus Memory Controller

• Fully distributed design with 1024-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
• Optimized for high performance HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering at high display resolutions

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

• 320 stream processing units
• Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
• Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
• Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
• 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
• Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
• Shader instruction and constant caches
• Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
• Up to 128 textures per pixel
• Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
• DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
• High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
• Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
• Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
• Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
• Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
• Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
• 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
• Physics processing support

Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10.0

• Shader Model 4.0
• Geometry Shaders
• Stream Output
• Integer and Bitwise Operations
• Alpha to Coverage
• Constant Buffers
• State Objects
• Texture Arrays

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

• High performance vertex cache
• Programmable tessellation unit
• Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
• Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

Anti-aliasing features

• Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
• Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
• Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
• Temporal anti-aliasing
• Gamma correct
• Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
• All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

Texture filtering features

• 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128taps per pixel)
• 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
• Bicubic filtering
• sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
• Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
• Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
• Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology

• Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
• Integrated compositing engine
• High performance dual channel interconnect

ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

• Two independent display controllers
• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
• Full 30-bit display processing
• Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
• Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
• High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
• Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
• Fast, glitch-free mode switching
• Hardware cursor
• Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
• Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
• Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
• Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
• Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
• HDMI output support
• Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
• Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
• Integrated Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
• Provides high quality analog TV output (component/Svideo/ composite)
• Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
• Underscan and overscan compensation
• HD decode acceleration for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats
• Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray playback
• Motion compensation and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation)
• HD video processing
• Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
• De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
• Edge enhancement
• Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
• Bad edit correction
• High fidelity gamma correction, color correction, color space conversion, and scaling
• MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• VGA mode support on all display outputs

• PCI Express x16 bus interface
• OpenGL 2.0 support