ATi Takes Over 3D Technology Leadership With Radeon 9700
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Page 1:Introduction
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Page 2:Unusual Launch Preparations
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Page 3:ATi's Radeon 9700 'VPU' - An Introduction
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Page 4:Radeon 9700 - Fully Loaded
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Page 5:AGP 8x
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Page 6:The Vertex Shaders
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Page 7:Pixel Shader 2.0 Specification
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Page 8:The Pixel Rendering Pipelines
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Page 9:Hyper-Z III
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Page 10:Smoothvision 2.0 - FSAA
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Page 11:Smoothvision 2.0 - Anisotropic Filtering
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Page 12:Display Output
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Page 13:Performance Evaluation
Hyper-Z III
Since the release of Radeon256 in July 2000, ATi calls its technique to avoid the rendering of hidden surfaces 'Hyper-Z,' and Radeon 9700 is equipped with its third generation. Just as the two versions before, it's meant to save precious memory bandwidth.
Hyper-Z divides the frame buffer and Z-buffer in blocks of 8x8 pixels, which can be cached and handled very efficiently. Fast Z-clear only clears a flag for each block, speeding up the Z-clearing process.
The newly improved lossless Z-compression is able to compress the z-values in those 8x8 pixel blocks at a compression ratio of between 2:1 up to 4:1 before the blocks are written to the Z-buffer, thus saving memory bandwidth.
In the case of 6x FSAA, the Z-compression (as well as color compression) can be up to 1:24, as for FSAA the frame and Z buffer blocks are utilized as well and the six corresponding sample blocks are compressed as one.
Hierarchical-Z is also utilizing the flag that stands for each 8x8 pixel Z-buffer block. This flag contains the lowest Z-value that is found in the block represented by the flag. The Z-value of a pixel that comes from triangle setup is checked against the Z-flag of the block in which the pixel is supposed to be drawn. If the pixel's Z-value is lower than the flag's value, the pixel is discarded and the block is not read from the Z-buffer into the cache. Should the Z-value of the pixel be higher than the flag value, the block is read from the Z-buffer into the cache, undergoing a Z-decompression along the way.
- Introduction
- Unusual Launch Preparations
- ATi's Radeon 9700 'VPU' - An Introduction
- Radeon 9700 - Fully Loaded
- AGP 8x
- The Vertex Shaders
- Pixel Shader 2.0 Specification
- The Pixel Rendering Pipelines
- Hyper-Z III
- Smoothvision 2.0 - FSAA
- Smoothvision 2.0 - Anisotropic Filtering
- Display Output
- Performance Evaluation