DirectX 8 for Notebooks
Only a short while ago, ATi unveiled
Things are all different in the notebook arena. Here, 3D graphics aren't as important and, at the same time, are much more difficult to implement. It still seems somewhat disappointing that since the inception of the first full-blood notebook 3D accelerator chip (
The Specifications of Mobility Radeon 9000
Mobility Radeon 9000 (code name 'M9') is not a dedicated notebook design, but derived from the desktop product Radeon 9000, ATi's latest value offering. Therefore, the technical specifications of Radeon 9000 aren't any different for the desktop product either. The desktop version may not require the power saving features, but that does not mean Radeon 9000 and Mobility Radeon 9000 would be different chips. They are completely identical, while of course the notebook versions are specially picked chips that ensure reliable operation at low voltage and power consumption. In the same way that Radeon 9000 introduced new standards to the value desktop market, bringing programmable vertex and pixel shaders to the lower price range of graphics cards, Mobility Radeon 9000 finally makes notebooks capable of running DirectX 8 games with all their impressive 3D-effects.
Before I will simply list all of the relevant features of Mobility Radeon 9000, I suggest you have a look at the
List of Features:
- 36 million Transistors, 0.15µ-process
- Core Clock 240 - 250 MHz, Memory Clock 400-440 MHz (both clocks depend on implementation)
- Theoretical Fill Rate 960 - 1000 Mpixel/s
- Memory Bandwidth 6400 - 7040 MB/s
- AGP 8x support
- Two DirectX 8.1 compliant programmable vertex shaders
- DirectX 8.1 compliant programmable pixel shaders
- Four pixel rendering pipelines
- One texturing unit per pixel pipeline
- Hyper-Z II Memory Bandwidth Optimization
- Smoothvision = Super Sampling FSAA
- Powerplay - ATi's power management (not implemented in first shipping notebooks!)
- Integrated MPEG2 (DVD) decoding units, like iDCT, motion compensation, hardware sub-picture decoder, adaptive de-interlacing
- 400 MHz RAMDAC, 165 MHz TMDS transmitter, integrated video-out
- Multi-display support with ATi Hydravision, allowing up to three displays at the same time (notebook panel, CRT, television)