A little birdy handed me some information about the new Radeon 8500 MAXX from ATi - As far as I know, this is what you can consider scoop.
R8500 MAXX
Features:
- Truform™
- Smartshader™
- AFR™
- DirectX 8.1® support
- OpenGL® 1.3
- Smoothvision™ Anti-aliasing
- Hyper Z™ III
- Charisma Engine™ II
- Pixel Tapestry™ II
- Video Immersion™ II
- High Performance Memory Support
- Dual Display Support
- Integrated Transformation, Clipping and Lighting
- Triple Cache Architecture
- SuperScalar Rendering
- Single-Pass Multi-texturing
- True Color Rendering
- Triangle Setup Engine
- Texture Cache
- Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering
- Line & Edge Anti-aliasing
- Full-Screen Anti-aliasing
- Texture Compositing
- Texture Decompression
- Specular Highlights
- Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping
- Mip-Mapping
- Z-Buffering and Double-buffering
- Emboss, Dot Product 3 and Environment bump mapping
- Spherical, Dual Paraboloid and Cubic environment mapping
- Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing
- Dual 400Mhz RAMDACS'
A popular rumour about the ‘Radeon II’ was that it would feature two Radeon256 GPUs, like the Rage Fury MAXX. As you know ATI brought out the Radeon 8500, which I think you will agree is a much better GPU than the Radeon256 and featured a lot more performance than two Radeon256 GPUs.
However, with the R300 in development, and the Radeon 8500 doing so well, it makes sense to release a dual Radeon 8500 board. A Radeon 8500 MAXX if you will, so we have more time to spend on the R300 where as the R250 isn’t going to be as much as an architectural change as the R300 will be. With the improved AFR™ technique used, we can almost double performance, without any of the negative effects attributed to SLI. This is the biggest new feature of the Radeon 8500 MAXX, but there are a few tweaks to the Radeon 8500 GPU.
The card has updated Hyper Z™ to make more effective use of available memory bandwidth. It now is 100% effective at removing hidden surfaces. Also as part of it we have given it an extra cache (hence the Triple Cache Architecture). This third cache stores the Z-Buffer coordinates of the previous scene; I can’t go into detail on it, but it effectively compares the cached Z-Buffer to the new one, this in conjunction with our new HSR algorithm allows for much quicker removal of hidden surfaces. For example in UT2003 you may be walking down a path, and in front of you is a large structure. No matter, which way you look, you can’t see the inside of the structure, only the front. With HSR, the polygons you don’t see are chucked away before they are rendered. With the help of the cache, it will be easier to see that those polygons are still behind the front and can be chucked away straight away, before using our complex algorithm to see fully if the polygon can be removed, thus saving a lot of computational power, and leaving more room for the actual rendering of the game. (We had begun optimising this further but the development of the drivers was problematic...they might just sort out for the planned release date.)
The dual 400Mhz RAMDACS are integrated in the Radeon 8500 GPU, but only one in each. The primary GPU houses the primary RAMDAC, and obviously the secondary GPU houses the secondary RAMDAC. This allows for all Radeon 8500 MAXX boards, regardless of manufacturer, to support dual 24” monitors. With the R300 we managed to integrate the 2D filters into the GPU as well, that way we can ensure all R300 boards have the best 2D quality available to users, regardless of who makes the card. The reason for this is a lot of customers have expressed their desire for much sharper text at high resolutions, as well as more vibrant colours. (my emphasis: We have managed to gain some improvements from this, but its still not great.)
We also have a daughter card that will be made available. This daughter card will feature full VIVO functions, expanding the features of the MAXX. The way the daughter board will be attached to the Radeon 8500 MAXX is currently still to be decided.
A prime concern with customers was texture quality. The devs at ATI have taken this very seriously, and have taken great lengths to make the texture quality of the Radeon 8500 MAXX the best of any other 3D product, and from working development cards it is noticeable better than the 8500. Only other comments I will give on the R300 are 8 pipelines, and DirectX 9 support.
