Introduction
AMD's latest generation of graphics cards is the HD 3000 Series, namely the HD 3850 and the HD 3870. Diamond has recently released a special version of the HD 3850 called the Ruby Edition. It features an improved dual-slot cooling solution and comes with more and faster memory.
| Radeon HD 2600 XT | GeForce 8600 GTS | Radeon HD 3850 | Diamond HD 3850 Ruby | GeForce 8800 GTS | GeForce 8800 GT | Radeon HD 2900 XT | GeForce 8800 GTX | GeForce 8800 Ultra |
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Shader units | 120 | 32 | 320 | 320 | 96 | 112 | 320 | 128 | 128 |
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ROPs | 4 x2 | 8 | 16 | 16 | 20 | 16 | 16 x2 | 24 | 24 |
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GPU | RV630 | G84 | RV670 | RV670 | G80 | G92 | R600 | G80 | G80 |
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Transistors | 390M | 289M | 666M | 666M | 681M | 754M | 700M | 681M | 681M |
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Memory Size | 256 MB | 256 MB | 256 MB | 512 MB | 320 MB 640 MB | 512 MB | 512 MB | 768 MB | 768 MB |
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Memory Bus Width | 128 bit | 128 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit | 320 bit | 256 bit | 512 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit |
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Core Clock | 800 MHz | 675 MHz | 670 MHz | 670 MHz | 500 MHz | 600 MHz | 742 MHz | 575 MHz | 612 MHz |
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Memory Clock | 1100 MHz | 1000 MHz | 828 MHz | 830 MHz | 800 MHz | 900 MHz | 825 MHz | 900 MHz | 1080 MHz |
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Price | $105 | $149 | $179 | $199 | $260 $350 | $249 | $380 | $530 | $650 |
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Complete Specifications
- 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
- PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
- 256-bit GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
- Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1
- 32-bit floating point texture filtering
- Indexed cube map arrays
- Independent blend modes per render target
- Pixel coverage sample masking
- Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
- Gather4 texture fetching
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
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 (2, 4, or 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 (ATI 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 128 taps 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
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
- Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
- High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
- Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
- Motion compensation and IDCT
- ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
- Color space conversion
- Chroma subsampling format conversion
- Horizontal and vertical scaling
- Gamma correction
- Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
- De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
- Detail enhancement
- Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
- Bad edit correction
- 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)2
- 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 2048x15362
- DisplayPort output support
- Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
- 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 AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
- Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
- Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
- Underscan and overscan compensation
- 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
ATI PowerPlay™
- Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
- Performance-on-Demand
- Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
- Clock and memory speed throttling
- Voltage switching
- Dynamic clock gating
- Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
- Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
- Integrated compositing engine
- High performance dual channel bridge interconnect