The first derivative architecture, RV200, did not follow the scheme used by later parts.
Fixed-pipeline family
R100/RV200
The Radeon, first introduced in 2000, was ATI's first graphics processor to be fully DirectX 7 compliant. R100 brought with it large gains in bandwidth and fill-rate efficiency through the new HyperZ technology.The RV200 was a die-shrink of the former R100 with some core logic tweaks for clockspeed, introduced in 2002. The only release in this generation was the Radeon 7500, which introduced little in the way of new features but offered substantial performance improvements over its predecessors.
R200
ATI's second generation Radeon included a sophisticated pixel shader architecture. This chipset implemented Microsoft's pixel shader 1.4 specification for the first time.Its performance relative to competitors was widely perceived as weak, and subsequent revisions of this generation were cancelled in order to focus on development of the next generation.
R300/R350
The R300 was the first GPU to fully support Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 technology upon its release in 2001. It incorporated fully programmable pixel and vertex shaders.About a year later, the architecture was revised to allow for higher frequencies, more efficient memory access, and several other improvements in the R350 family. A budget line of RV350 products was based on this refreshed design with some elements disabled or removed.
Models using the new PCI Express interface were introduced in 2004. Using 110-nm and 130-nm manufacturing technologies under the X300 and X600 names, respectively, the RV370 and RV380 graphics processors were used extensively by consumer PC manufacturers.
R420
While heavily based upon the previous generation, this line included extensions to the Shader Model 2 feature-set. Shader Model 2b, the specification ATI and Microsoft defined with this generation, offered somewhat more shader program flexibility.R520
ATI's DirectX 9.0c series of graphics cards, with complete Shader Model 3.0 support. Launched in October 2005, this series brought a number of enhancements including the floating point render target technology necessary for HDR rendering with anti-aliasing.TeraScale-family
R600
Main article: Radeon HD 3000 Series
ATI's first series of GPUs to replace the old fixed-pipeline and implement unified shader model.
Subsequent revisions tuned the design for higher performance and energy
efficiency, resulting in the ATI Mobility Radeon HD series for mobile
computers.R700
Main article: Radeon HD 4000 Series
Based on the R600 architecture. Mostly a bolstered with many more
stream processors, with improvements to power consumption and GDDR5
support for the high-end RV770 and RV740(HD4770) chips. It arrived in
late June 2008. The HD 4850 and HD 4870 have 800 stream processors and
GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory, respectively. The 4890 was a refresh of 4870
with the same amount of stream processors yet higher clock rates due to
refinements. The 4870x2 has 1600 stream processors and GDDR5 memory on
an effective 512-bit memory bus with 230.4 Gbit/s video memory bandwidth
available.Evergreen
Main article: Radeon HD 5000 Series
The series was launched on September 23, 2009. It featured a 40 nm
fabrication process for the entire product line (only the HD4770 (RV740)
was built on this process previously), with more stream cores and
compatibility with the next major version of the DirectX API, DirectX 11, which launched on October 22, 2009 along with Microsoft Windows 7.
The Rxxx/RVxxx codename scheme was scrapped entirely. The initial
launched consisted of only the 5870 and 5850 models. ATI released beta
drivers that introduces full OpenGL 4.0 support on the all variants of
this series in March 2010.[5]
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