ATI Radeon is a brand of graphics processing units (GPU) that since 2000 has been manufactured by ATI Technologies and subsequently AMD and is the successor to their Rage line. There are four different groups, which can be differentiated by the DirectX generation they support. More specific distinctions can also be followed, such as the HyperZ version, the number of pixel pipelines, and of course, the memory and processor clock speeds.
ATI Radeon processor generations
Radeon card brands
AMD no longer sells Radeon cards at the retail level. Instead, it sells Radeon GPUs to 3rd party board manufacturers, who build and sell the Radeon-based boards to the OEM and retail channel. Board manufacturers of the Radeon include Diamond Multimedia, Sapphire Technology, AsusTek, HIS – Hightech Information System Limited, Micro-Star International, PowerColor, Gigabyte, VisionTek, and, recently, XFX & Gainward.
Product naming scheme
Since ATI's first DirectX 9-class GPU, the company has followed a naming scheme that relates each product to a market segment.
- 1 Stream processors only applicable to Radeon HD 2000 series video cards.
Note : Suffix indicate different layers of performance. See ATI Video Card Suffixes .
Since the release of the Radeon HD 3000 series products, previous PRO, XT, GT, and XTX suffixes were eliminated, products will be differentiated by changing the last two digits of the product model number (for instance, HD 3850 and HD 3870, giving the impression that the HD 3870 model having higher performance than HD 3850). Similar changes to the IGP naming were spotted as well, for the previously launched AMD M690T chipset with side-port memory, the IGP is named "Radeon X1270", while for the AMD 690G chipset, the IGP is named "Radeon X1250", as for AMD 690V chipset, the IGP is clocked lower and having fewer functions and thus named "Radeon X1200". The new numbering scheme of video products are shown below:
- 1 The last two digits denotes variant, similar to the previous suffixes, which "70" is in essence the "XT" variant while "50" is actually the "Pro" variant.
- 2 Stream processors only applicable to Direct3D 10-class video components (Radeon HD 2000/3000 series).
Drivers
Windows
Main article: ATI CatalystThe ATI Radeon graphics driver package for Windows operating system is called ATI Catalyst.
The ATI Catalyst official drivers refuse to work with the mobile versions of Radeon series due to an agreement with OEM vendors. An alternative is an application called Mobility Modder, a third-party utility which modifies recent desktop Radeon drivers to work with Mobility Radeon graphics cards.
There are also unofficial modifications available such as Omega drivers or DNA drivers. These drivers typically consist of mixtures of various driver file versions with some registry variables altered and are advertised as offering superior performance or image quality. They are, of course, unsupported, and as such, are not guaranteed to function correctly. Some of them also provide modified system files for hardware enthusiasts to run specific graphics cards outside of their specifications.
Macintosh
ATI used to only offer driver updates for their retail Mac video cards, but now also offer drivers for all ATI Mac products, including the GPUs in Apple's portable lines. Apple also includes ATI driver updates whenever they release a new OS update. ATI provides a preference panel for use in Mac OS X called ATI Displays which can be used both with retail and OEM versions of its cards. Though it gives more control over advanced features of the graphics chipset, ATI Displays has limited functionality compared to their Catalyst for Windows product.
ATI stopped support for Mac OS 9 after the Radeon R200 cards, making the last officially supported card the Radeon 9200. The Radeon R100 cards up to the Radeon 7000 can still be used with even older Mac OS versions such as System 7, although not all features are taken advantage of by the older operating system.
Linux
Main article: fglrxInitially, ATI did not produce Radeon drivers for Linux, instead giving hardware specifications and documentation to Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) developers under various non-disclosure agreements.
In mid 2004, however, ATI started to support Linux (XFree86, X.Org), hiring a new Linux driver team to produce fglrx . Their new proprietary Linux drivers, instead of being a port of the Windows Catalyst drivers, were based on the Linux drivers for the FireGL (the FireGL drivers worked with Radeons before, but didn't officially support them), a card geared towards graphics producers, not gamers; though the display drivers part is now based on the same sources as the ones from Windows Catalyst since version 4.x in late 2004. The proprietary Linux drivers could support R200 (Radeon 8500-9200, 9250) chips. For a better display driver, the repository drivers are recommended.
The frequency of driver updates increased in late 2004, releasing Linux drivers every two months, half as often as their Windows counterparts. Then since late 2005 this has been increased to monthly releases, inline with the Windows Catalyst releases.
In 2008, Ati changed its release cycles and driver versions; now referred to as Catalyst <year>.<month>, the driver package still includes an internal 8.xx.x driver revision, but it is now monthly, sharing a common code base with the Windows driver (starting with internal release 8.43). In 2009, the Catalyst driver officially dropped support for R500 and older chips, the FOSS driver being deemed stable and complete enough. The last driver release supporting older architectures is Catalyst 9.3.
For information on alternative Open Source drivers, see below.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD systems have the same open-source support for Radeon hardware as Linux, including 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300-series chipsets. The R300 support, as with Linux, remained experimental due to being reverse-engineered from ATI's proprietary drivers, but with the release of official documentation by AMD (following its buying out of Ati), all Radeon families up to R700 have at least 2D support in the FOSS drivers, with basic video acceleration and power management, and up to R500, have at least 'basic' (up to OpenGL 1.5 feature set, GLSL is still a work in progress) 3D acceleration. On R600/700, 3D is still very much experimental, and Evergreen support has barely started due to lack of documentation.
ATI does not support its proprietary fglrx driver on FreeBSD, it has been partly ported by a third party as of January 2007. This is in contrast to its main rival, NVIDIA, which has periodically released its proprietary driver for FreeBSD since November 2002 (64-bit beta driver available as of December 3, 2009). In the meantime the release is similar to Linux.
MidnightBSD
MidnightBSD supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200, and R300 chipsets. This support is similar to FreeBSD and Linux.
AmigaOS
Since AmigaOS 4 introduction AmigaOS users officially gained partial support for R100/R200 Radeon cards (Radeon 8500/9100 have no 3D support).
Hans de Ruiter is developing on R5xx and R6xx drivers from AMD documentation. His basic P96 2D driver, which works with the PCI Radeon X1300, X1550 and HD2400 that Hans is using for development and testing is unreleased yet.
BeOS
Although ATI does not provide its own drivers for BeOS, it provides hardware and technical documentation to the Haiku Project who provide drivers with full 2D and video in/out support. They are the sole graphics manufacturer in any way still supporting BeOS.
MorphOS
MorphOS supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100 and R200 chipsets.
FOSS drivers
See also: Graphics hardware and FOSS#ATI/AMDOn September 12, 2007, AMD released documentation without an NDA for the RV630 (Radeon HD 2600 PRO and Radeon HD 2600 XT) and M56 (Radeon Mobility X1600) chips for open source driver development, for its strategic open source driver development initiative. This initial "documentation drop" released sufficient programming information for a skeleton display detection and modesetting driver to be released. This was version 1.0.0 of the "radeonhd" driver, developed in cooperation with Novell. The register reference guides for M76 (Mobility Radeon HD 2600/2700/3600/3800 series) and RS690 (AMD 690 chipset series) were also released on January 4, 2008..
Most of the work is shared with the existing Xorg radeon driver that also supports older Radeon architectures . Conceptually, radeonhd initially tried to directly hit a card's register to perform its operations, while Xorg's driver radeon makes use of AtomBIOS (an abstraction layer created by Ati to ease the programming of new video card drivers) when available. Since AtomBIOS headers have been made public by AMD and are kept up to date, the argument went rather moot.
As of December 2009 the DRM part of the radeon driver is now included in the mainstream Linux kernel, the first version appearing in kernel version 2.6.32, used by default on several GNU/Linux distributions.
See also
- Comparison of ATI graphics p
S85PCI|ATI Radeon™ 9250 DIAMOND STEALTH S85 PCI ...
S85PCI,ATI Radeon™ 9250 DIAMOND STEALTH S85 PCI 128MB DDR DVI & TV Out Video Card ,Buy the best ,Sound Card,Video Cards, ATI Video Card, ATI Radeon, PCI Video Card, AGP Video ...
ATI Radeon 9250 / 256MB DDR / PCI / VGA / Composite ...
Buy the ATI Radeon 9250 at a super low price. TigerDirect.com is your one source for the best computer and electronics deals anywhere, anytime.
ATI Radeon 9250 PCI - ATI - Graphic-Displays
I have an old P4 Compaq Evo D5S/P1.7 Small Form Factor desktop that I am trying to turn into an HTPC. I have XP SP2 installed using an ATI Radeon 9250 256MB PCI video card. The ...
ati radeon 9250 pci video card driver for mac os x 10.4 ...
Computer Hope - Computer Help Forums >>Hardware >>Drivers >>Topic: ati radeon 9250 pci video card driver for mac os x 10.4. 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Amazon.com: Ati Radeon 9250 Pci 128MB Graphic Video ...
Ati Radeon 9250 Pci 128MB Graphic Video Card Other products by Best Data Products
AMD Game Forums - counter strike 1.6 with ati radeon ...
Topic Title: counter strike 1.6 with ati radeon 9250 256 mb pci Topic Summary: HELP PL0X Created On: 11/09/2009 12:14 PM Status: Post and Reply
Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: ATI 100-436012 Radeon ...
Excellent Video Card for a PCI Bus The ATI Radeon 9250 256MB video card is absolutely amazing. This is the best video card that your dollar can buy for a PCI Bus computer system.
Ati Radeon 9250 128mb Ddr 2port Pci Vga Dvi Tv-out 250w ...
Buy Visiontek Ati Radeon 9250 128mb Ddr 2port Pci Vga Dvi Tv-out 250w+ Req VTK9250128P Graphics Cards Controllers at PCNation.com
Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon 9250 PCI 256MB
Get Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon 9250 PCI 256MB & all of your Graphics & Video Cards supplies from OfficeMax. Whether you're looking for Diamond Stealth ATI Radeon 9250 PCI 256MB or ...
ATI 100-436012 Radeon 9250 256MB 128-bit DDR PCI Video ...
ATI 100-436012 Radeon 9250 256MB 128-bit DDR PCI Video Card, Graphics, Sound & Video Cards, Computers & Accessories Videopinions are product reviews and demonstrations by the ...