Introduction

AMD's Radeon HD 3850 Series has been on the market for a while now. Add-in-Board Partners are constantly looking for ways to seperate themselves from the competition and that's why Sapphire has engineered a Radeon HD 3850 with 1 GB of GDDR3 memory.

The PCB design has remained essentially the same, the number of memory chips is unchanged as well, Sapphire simply uses GDDR3 memory chips with a higher capacity. Another change is the increased core clock of 702 MHz. According to Sapphire the price premium of the 1024 MB version vs. the 256 MB version is about $50.

Complete Specifications

• 666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
• 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