1. RADEON™ 9700 Architecture and 3D Performance
Gordon Elder
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

2. RADEON™ 9700 What is the RADEON™ 9700 ?
Programmability(SMARTSHADER™ 2.0)
First Full Floating Point Graphics Pipeline
Enables Compilation of High Level Shading Languages
Performance
High Bandwidth
Parallelism
Efficiency
Image Quality (SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0)
Multisample Antialiasing
Anisotropic Texture Filtering

3. Image Generation with Image Mapping 1st Generation Programmability
Idea: Texture Mapping, Blinn and Newell 1976
Implementation: SGI VGXT 1990
Hardwired Vertex Processing
Hardwired Fragment Processing with a Single Texture
Result: Environment Mapping and other effects
Blinn, J. F. and Newell, M. E. Texture and reflection in computer generated images. Communications of the ACM Vol. 19, No. 10 (October 1976),

4. Image Generation with Texture Composition 2nd Generation Programmability
Idea: Shade trees, R. Cook 1984
Implementation: RADEON™
Limited Vertex Programmability
Limited Fragment Processing
Multiple Textures
Fixed Point Data
Short Programs
Result: Current generation of effects.
Robert L. Cook Shade Trees. Computer Graphics Vol. 18, No. 3, (July 1984),

5. Image Generation with General Purpose Floating Point Math & Texturing 3rd Generation Programmability
Idea: RenderMan®, Pixar 1987
Implementation: ATI RADEON™
Advanced Vertex Programmability
Advanced Fragment Programmability
Floating Point Data
Rich Instruction Set
Large Instruction Store
Result: Enabling Cinematic Rendering
Compiling RenderMan®, Maya, etc.
Willina T. Reeves, David H. Salesin, Robert L. Cook Rendering Antialiased Shadows with Depth Maps. Computer Graphics Vol. 21, No. 4, (July 1987),

6. SMARTSHADER™ 2.0 Next-generation programmable shader technology
Enabling cinema-quality effects in real time
First complete DirectX® 9.0 feature support
2.0 Vertex and Pixel Shaders
Floating Point Pixel Pipelines
128-bit Floating Point Texture and Frame Buffer Formats
Two-Sided Stencil Shadow Acceleration
High Precision 32-bpp (10:10:10:2) Display Mode
Higher Order Surface Enhancements
Full feature set also available for OpenGL®
OpenGL® Shading Language Support
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

7. Vertex Shaders (SMARTSHADER™ 2.0)
Flow Control
Loops, jumps and subroutines
Allow re-use of certain parts of the shader code
Avoids repetition and saves instructions
More Instructions, More Complex Effects
Up to 65,280 instructions per pass
Vertex shaders can be much more complex than they were in DX8
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

8. Pixel Shaders (SMARTSHADER™ 2.0)
More Complex Shaders by an Order of Magnitude
Up to 160 instructions per pass
32 address ops, 64 color ops, 64 alpha ops
Compared with 12 instructions total in DX8.0
Multi-pass rendering support
High precision 128-bit floating point data formats for storing intermediate results between passes
Shaders can now effectively be thousands of instructions long – performance is the only limitation
24-bit per component floating point precision for all pixel shader operations - necessary for cinema-quality effects
Allows shaders written in any present or future language to run on hardware with SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
Even high level languages like RenderMan® can now be compiled to run on RADEON™ 9700 in real time
Pixel shader can also implement complex Image Processing algorithms
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

9. RADEON 9700 Performance
Key design elements for best performance: High Bandwidth, Parallelism, & Efficiency
High Bandwidth
AGP 8x provides 2 GB/sec transfers to or from the CPU or system memory.
310 MHz 256-bit DDR Memory Interface provides GB/sec access to the Frame Buffer
Internal 256-bit data busses for Color, Texture and Z
Parallelism
4 Vertex Engines running at 325MHz provides Mtriangles/sec (4 clocks per vertex per engine)
8 Pixels/Clock Rasterization Architecture running at 325MHz provides a peak fill rate of 2.6 Gpix/sec
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

10. RADEON 9700 Performance (cont.)
Efficiency
Graphics systems tend to be Memory Bandwidth limited. The RADEON™ 9700 is no exception. So it is important to use the bandwidth efficiently.
Hierarchical and Early Z checking allows pixels to be rejected before the pixel shader. This is very important when shader programs are long.
Color, Texture and Z caches reduce memory bandwidth utilization. Benefit from spacial and temporal locality.
Lossless Color and Z data compression reduce memory bandwidth utilization.
Compressed Textures can be utilized to reduce memory bandwidth utilization.
Fast Color and Z clears eliminate need to access memory for clears
HyperZ III

11. RADEON™ 9700 Performance (cont.)
One more interesting thing……..
Scalability
The RADEON™ 9700 Architecture is capable of scaling up to 256 simultaneous units

12. Image Quality (SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0 )
Performance matters too
Pixel antialiasing and anisotropic texture filtering improve image quality only if they are enabled.
Just going to higher resolutions isn’t the answer for improved image quality.
Artifacts due to poor texture sampling remain.
Dynamic antialiasing artifacts are still very visible.
Sufficient performance for high resolution display, high quality texture filtering, and antialiasing is needed.
The RADEON™ 9700 was architected to do all three simultaneously.

13. Anti-Aliasing (SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0)
Non-Grid Programmable Multi-Sampling
2, 4, or 6 samples per pixel
Sample positions provide the maximum quality per sample
Lossless Z and Color compression minimizes bandwidth cost of higher sample counts.
Per Sample Gamma Correction
Takes gamma into account when blending samples
Creates smoother edge transitions
Standard
Edge Gradient
Input
Output
Gamma Corrected
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

14. Anisotropic Filtering (SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0)
Improved Adaptive Algorithm
Up to 16 Trilinear Samples (128-tap)
Calculates optimal number of samples for each polygon
Delivers full image quality benefit while conserving memory bandwidth
ATI Technologies - Confidential
19 April 2019

15. RADEON™ 9700 Demos

16. Conclusion