The R520 (codenamed Fudo) is a
graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...
(GPU) developed by
ATI Technologies
ATI Technologies Inc. (commonly called ATI) was a Canadian semiconductor industry, semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Fo ...
and produced by
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semicon ...
. It was the first GPU produced using a
90 nm
The 90 nm process refers to the level of MOSFET (CMOS) fabrication process technology that was commercialized by the 2003–2005 timeframe, by leading semiconductor companies like Toshiba, Sony, Samsung, IBM, Intel, Fujitsu, TSMC, Elpid ...
photolithography
In integrated circuit manufacturing, photolithography or optical lithography is a general term used for techniques that use light to produce minutely patterned thin films of suitable materials over a substrate, such as a silicon wafer, to protect ...
process.
The R520 is the foundation for a line of
DirectX
Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...
9.0c and
OpenGL
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics. The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardwa ...
2.0 3D accelerator X1000
video card
A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or mistakenly GPU) is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device, such as a computer moni ...
s. It is ATI's first major architectural overhaul since the
R300
The R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and developed by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU used in '' Radeon'' graphics cards. This GPU features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, a major improvement in featur ...
and is highly optimized for
Shader Model
The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language f ...
3.0. The
Radeon
Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tech ...
X1000 series using the core was introduced on October 5, 2005, and competed primarily against Nvidia's
GeForce 7000 series. ATI released the successor to the R500 series with the
R600 series on May 14, 2007.
ATI does not provide official support for any X1000 series cards for
Windows 8
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
or
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
; the last
AMD Catalyst
AMD Radeon Software is a device driver and utility software package for AMD's graphics cards and APUs. Its graphical user interface is built with Electron and is compatible with 64-bit Windows and Linux distributions.
Software bundle
Func ...
for this generation is the 10.2 from 2010 up to
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
. AMD stopped providing drivers for Windows 7 for this series in 2015.
A series of open source
Radeon
Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tech ...
drivers are available when using a
Linux distribution
A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...
.
The same GPUs are also found in some
AMD FireMV AMD FireMV, formerly ATI FireMV, is brand name for graphics cards marketed as a Multi-Display 2D video card, with 3D capabilities same as the low-end Radeon graphics products. It competes directly with Matrox professional video cards. FireMV cards ...
products targeting
multi-monitor
Multi-monitor, also called multi-display and multi-head, is the use of multiple physical display devices, such as monitors, televisions, and projectors, in order to increase the area available for computer programs running on a single computer sy ...
set-ups.
Delay during the development
The Radeon X1800 video cards that included an R520 were released with a delay of several months because ATI engineers discovered a bug within the GPU in a very late stage of development. This bug, caused by a faulty 3rd party 90 nm chip design library, greatly hampered clock speed ramping, so they had to "respin" the chip for another revision (a new
GDSII
GDSII stream format (GDSII), is a binary database file format which is the de facto industry standard for Electronic Design Automation data exchange of integrated circuit or IC layout artwork. It is a binary file format representing planar geome ...
had to be sent to
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semicon ...
). The problem had been almost random in how it affected the prototype chips, making it difficult to identify.
Architecture
The R520 architecture is referred to by ATI as an "Ultra
Threaded Dispatch Processor", which refers to ATI's plan to boost the efficiency of their GPU, instead of going with a brute force increase in the number of processing units. A central
pixel shader
In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of spec ...
"dispatch unit" breaks shaders down into threads (batches) of 16 pixels (4×4) and can track and distribute up to 128 threads per pixel "quad" (4 pipelines each). When a shader quad becomes idle due to a completion of a task or waiting for other data, the dispatch engine assigns the quad with another task to do in the meantime. The overall result is theoretically a greater utilization of the shader units. With a large number of threads per quad, ATI created a very large
processor register
A processor register is a quickly accessible location available to a computer's processor. Registers usually consist of a small amount of fast storage, although some registers have specific hardware functions, and may be read-only or write-only. ...
array that is capable of multiple concurrent reads and writes, and has a high-bandwidth connection to each shader array, providing the temporary storage necessary to keep the pipelines fed by having work available as much as possible. With chips such as RV530 and R580, where the number of shader units per pipeline triples, the efficiency of pixel shading drops off slightly because these shaders still have the same level of threading resources as the less endowed RV515 and R520.
[Wasson, Scott]
ATI's Radeon X1000 series graphics processors
Tech Report, October 5, 2005.
The next major change to the core is to its memory bus.
R420
The R420 GPU, developed by ATI Technologies, was the company's basis for its 3rd-generation DirectX 9.0/ OpenGL 2.0-capable graphics cards. Used first on the Radeon X800, the R420 was produced on a 0.13 micrometer (130 nm) low-''K'' photoli ...
and
R300
The R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and developed by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU used in '' Radeon'' graphics cards. This GPU features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0, a major improvement in featur ...
had nearly identical memory controller designs, with the former being a bug fixed release designed for higher clock speeds. R520's memory bus differs with its central controller (arbiter) that connects to the "memory clients". Around the chip are two 256-bit ring buses running at the same speed as the
DRAM
Dynamic random-access memory (dynamic RAM or DRAM) is a type of random-access semiconductor memory that stores each bit of data in a memory cell, usually consisting of a tiny capacitor and a transistor, both typically based on metal-oxid ...
chips, but in opposite directions to reduce latency. Along these ring buses are four "stop" points where data exits the ring and goes into or out of the memory chips. There is a fifth, significantly less complex stop that is designed for the
PCI Express
PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
interface and video input. This design allows memory accesses to be quicker though lower latency from the smaller distance the signals need to move through the GPU, and by increasing the number of banks per DRAM. The chip can spread out memory requests faster and more directly to the RAM chips. ATI claimed a 40% improvement in efficiency over older designs. Smaller cores such as RV515 and RV530 received cutbacks due to their smaller, less costly designs. RV530, for example, has two internal 128-bit buses instead. This generation has support for all recent memory types, including
GDDR4
GDDR4 SDRAM, an abbreviation for Graphics Double Data Rate 4 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory, is a type of graphics card memory (SGRAM) specified by the JEDEC Semiconductor Memory Standard. It is a rival medium to Rambus's XDR DRAM. GDDR ...
. In addition to a ring bus, each memory channel has the granularity of 32-bits, which improves memory efficiency when performing small memory requests.
The vertex shader engines were already at the required
FP32
Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point.
A floating- ...
precision in ATI's older products. Changes necessary for SM3.0 included longer instruction lengths, dynamic flow control instructions, with branches, loops and subroutines and a larger temporary register space. The pixel shader engines are actually quite similar in computational layout to their R420 counterparts, although they were heavily optimized and tweaked to reach high clock speeds on the 90 nm process. ATI has been working for years on a high-performance shader compiler in their driver for their older hardware, so staying with a similar basic design that is compatible offered obvious cost and time savings.
At the end of the pipeline, the texture addressing processors are decoupled from pixel shaders, so any unused texturing units can be dynamically allocated to pixels that need more texture layers. Other improvements include 4096x4096 texture support and ATI's 3Dc
normal map compression saw an improvement in compression ratio for more specific situations.
The R5xx family introduced a more advanced onboard motion-video engine. Like the Radeon cards since the R100, the R5xx can offload almost the entire MPEG-1/2 video pipeline. The R5xx can also assist in Microsoft WMV9/
VC-1
SMPTE 421, informally known as VC-1, is a video coding format. Most of it was initially developed as Microsoft's proprietary video format Windows Media Video 9 in 2003. With some enhancements including the development of a new Advanced Profile, ...
and MPEG
H.264
Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...
/AVC decoding, by a combination of the 3D/pipeline's shader-units and the motion-video engine. Benchmarks show only a modest decrease in CPU-utilization for VC-1 and H.264 playback.
A selection of real-time 3D demonstration programs was released at launch. ATI's development of their "digital superstar", Ruby, continued with a new demo named The Assassin. It showcased a highly complex environment, with
high-dynamic-range lighting (HDR) and dynamic
soft shadows
The umbra, penumbra and antumbra are three distinct parts of a shadow, created by any light source after impinging on an opaque object. Assuming no diffraction, for a collimated beam (such as a point source) of light, only the umbra is cast.
Th ...
. Ruby's latest competing program, Cyn, was composed of 120,000 polygons.
The cards support dual-link
DVI
Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source, such as a video display controller, to a display device, such as a comp ...
output and
HDCP
High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) is a form of digital copy protection developed by Intel Corporation to prevent copying of digital audio and video content as it travels across connections. Types of connections include DisplayPort ...
. However, using HDCP requires external ROM to be installed, which were not available for early models of the video cards. RV515, RV530, and RV535 cores include a single and a double DVI link; R520, RV560, RV570, R580, R580+ cores include two double DVI links.
AMD released the final Radeon R5xx Acceleration document.
Drivers
The last
AMD Catalyst
AMD Radeon Software is a device driver and utility software package for AMD's graphics cards and APUs. Its graphical user interface is built with Electron and is compatible with 64-bit Windows and Linux distributions.
Software bundle
Func ...
version that officially supports this series, is 10.2, display driver version 8.702.
Variants
X1300–X1550 series
![ATI Radeon X1300 256MB-5388](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5b/ATI_Radeon_X1300_256MB-5388.jpg)
This series is the budget solution of the X1000 series and is based on the RV515 core. The chips have four
texture units, four
ROPs
Rops may refer to:
People
* Daniel-Rops (1901–1965), French writer and historian
* Félicien Rops (1833–1898), Belgian artist
Places
* Rops (peak), a mountain in Kosovo
Sports
* Rovaniemen Palloseura (RoPS), a Finnish football club
Tech ...
, four pixel shaders, and 2
vertex shader
In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene - a process known as ''shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of speci ...
s, similar to the older
X300 – X600 cards. These chips use one quad of an R520, whereas the faster boards use just more of these quads; for example, the X1800 uses four quads. This modular design allows ATI to build a "top to bottom" line-up using identical technology, saving research, development time, and money. Because of its smaller design, these cards offer lower power demands (30 watts), so they run cooler and can be used in smaller cases.
Eventually, ATI created the X1550 and discontinued the X1300. The X1050 was based on the R300 core and was sold as an ultra-low-budget part.
Early Mobility Radeon X1300 to X1450 are based around the RV515 core as well.
Beginning in 2006, Radeon X1300 and X1550 products were shifted to the RV505 core, which had similar capabilities and features as the previous RV515 core, but was manufactured by
TSMC
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational corporation, multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semicon ...
using an 80 nm process (reduced from the 90 nm process of the RV515).
X1600 series
X1600 uses the M56 core which is based on the RV530 core, a core similar but distinct from RV515.
The RV530 has a 3:1 ratio of pixel shaders to texture units. It possesses 12 pixel shaders while retaining RV515's four texture units and four ROPs. It also gains three extra vertex shaders, bringing the total to 5 units. The chip's single "quad" has 3 pixel shader processors per pipeline, similar to the design of R580's 4 quads. This means that RV530 has the same texturing ability as the X1300 at the same clock speed, but with its 12 pixel shaders it is on par with the X1800 in shader computational performance. Due to the programming content of available games, the X1600 is greatly hampered by lack of texturing power.
The X1600 was positioned to replace
Radeon X600 and
Radeon X700 as ATI's mid-range GPU. The Mobility Radeon X1600 and X1700 are also based on the RV530.
X1650 series
![ATI Radeon X1650 Pro-4352](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/ATI_Radeon_X1650_Pro-4352.jpg)
The X1650 series has two parts: the X1650 Pro uses the RV535 core (which is a RV530 core manufactured on the newer 80 nm process), and has both a lower power consumption and heat output than the X1600. The other part, the X1650XT, uses the newer RV570 core (also known as the RV560) though it has lower processing power (note that the fully equipped RV570 core powers the X1950Pro, a high-performance card) to match its main competitor, Nvidia's 7600GT.
[Wasson, Scott]
ATI's Radeon X1650 XT graphics card
Tech Report, October 30, 2006.
X1800 series
Originally the flagship of the X1000 series, the X1800 series was released with mild reception due to the
rolling release
Rolling release, also known as rolling update or continuous delivery, is a concept in software development of frequently delivering updates to applications. This is in contrast to a ''standard'' or ''point release'' development model which uses so ...
and the gain by its competitor at that time, NVIDIA's
GeForce 7 Series
The GeForce 7 series is the seventh generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units. This was the last series available on AGP cards.
A slightly modified GeForce 7-based card (more specifically based on the 7800GTX) is present as the ...
. When the X1800 entered the market in late 2005, it was the first high-end video card with a 90 nm GPU. ATI opted to fit the cards with either 256
MB or 512 MB on-board memory (foreseeing a future of ever growing demands on local memory size). The X1800XT PE was exclusively on 512 MB on-board memory. The X1800 replaced the R480-based
Radeon X850
The R420 GPU, developed by ATI Technologies, was the company's basis for its 3rd-generation DirectX 9.0/OpenGL 2.0-capable graphics cards. Used first on the Radeon X800, the R420 was produced on a 0.13 micrometer (130 nm) low-''K'' photolithogr ...
as ATI's premier performance GPU.
With R520's delayed release, its competition was far more impressive than if the chip had made its originally scheduled spring/summer release. Like its predecessor, the X850, the R520 chip carries 4 "quads", which means it has similar texturing capability at the same clock speed as its ancestor and the NVIDIA 6800 series. Unlike the X850, the R520's shader units are vastly improved: they are
Shader Model 3
The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language ...
capable, and received some advancements in shader threading that can greatly improve the efficiency of the shader units. Unlike the X1900, the X1800 has 16 pixel shader processors and equal ratio of texturing to pixel shading capability. The chip also increases the vertex shader number from six on the X800 to eight. With the 90 nm
low-K fabrication process, these high-transistor chips could still be clocked at very high frequencies, which allows the X1800 series to be competitive with GPUs with more pipelines but lower clock speeds, such as the NVIDIA 7800 and 7900 series that use 24 pipelines.
The X1800 was quickly replaced by the X1900 because of its delayed release. The X1900 was not behind schedule, and was always planned as the "spring refresh" chip. However, due to the large quantity of unused X1800 chips, ATI decided to kill one quad of pixel pipelines and sell them off as the X1800GTO.
X1900 and X1950 series
The X1900 and X1950 series fixed several flaws in the X1800 design and added a significant pixel shading performance boost. The R580 core is pin-compatible with the R520
PCBs
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are highly carcinogenic chemical compounds, formerly used in industrial and consumer products, whose production was banned in the United States by the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1979 and internationally by t ...
, which meant a redesign of the X1800 PCB was not needed. The boards carry either 256 MB or 512 MB of onboard
GDDR3
GDDR3 SDRAM (Graphics Double Data Rate 3 SDRAM) is a type of DDR SDRAM specialized for graphics processing units (GPUs) offering less access latency and greater device bandwidths. Its specification was developed by ATI Technologies in collabor ...
memory depending on the variant. The primary change between the R580 and the R520 is that ATI changed the pixel shader processor-to-texture processor ratio. The X1900 cards have three pixel shaders on each pipeline instead of one, giving a total of 48 pixel shader units. ATI took this step with the expectation that future 3D software will be more pixel shader intensive.
In the latter half of 2006, ATI introduced the Radeon X1950 XTX, which is a graphics board using a revised R580 GPU called R580+. R580+ is the same as R580 except it supports GDDR4 memory, a new graphics DRAM technology that offers lower power consumption per clock and offers a significantly higher clock rate ceiling. The X1950 XTX clocks its RAM at 1 GHz (2 GHz DDR), providing 64.0 GB/s of memory bandwidth, a 29% advantage over the X1900 XTX. The card was launched on August 23, 2006.
The X1950 Pro was released on October 17, 2006, and was intended to replace the X1900GT in the competitive sub-$200 market segment. The X1950 Pro GPU is built off of the 80 nm RV570 core with only 12 texture units and 36 pixel shaders, and is the first ATI card that supports native Crossfire implementation by a pair of internal Crossfire connectors, which eliminates the need for the unwieldy external dongle found in older Crossfire systems.
[Wilson, Derek]
ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right
AnandTech, October 17, 2006.
Radeon feature matrix
Chipset table
See also
*
List of AMD graphics processing units
The following is a list that contains general information about GPUs and video cards by AMD, including those by ATI Technologies before 2006, based on official specifications in table-form.
Field explanations
The headers in the table listed b ...
*
Free and open-source device drivers: graphics#ATI.2FAMD
References
External links
R500 family ISA documentationtechPowerUp! GPU Database
{{ATI
ATI Technologies products
Graphics cards
Computer-related introductions in 2005
fr:Radeon R500