ATI Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 Performance

Wednesday, June 27, 2007 - by Marco Chiappetta in Graphics/Sound
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About six weeks ago, after an extended development cycle, AMD launched their latest flagship ATI-GPU based graphics card, the Radeon HD 2900 XT.  The Radeon HD 2900 XT is built around the company's unified, DirectX 10-class, R600 GPU and offers a number of key features over an above the older X1000 series of products, like new anti-aliasing modes and support for shader model 4.0.

At the time of the HD 2900 XT's debut, AMD also disclosed a multitude of details regarding mobile and mainstream GPUs derived from the R600 architecture.  In our coverage of the Radeon HD 2000 series as it became known, we talked about not only the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but five other members of the family, including the Radeon HD 2600 XT (GDDR3 and GDDR4 versions), the 2600 Pro, and the Radeon HD 2400 XT and Pro.  Unfortunately, cards weren’t ready in time to launch alongside the 2900 XT, but they are now and we’ve got a trio of them in house for a benchmarking throw-down.

On the pages ahead, we’ll go into detail on the new Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4, the Radeon HD 2600 Pro, and the Radeon HD 2400 XT, and compare their performance to a number of current and previous generation cards.  But first, here are the Radeon HD 2600 and HD 2400 series’ features and specifications, as per the folks at ATI...

ATI Radeon HD 2600 Family
Features and Specifications

  • 390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
  • 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
  • Ring Bus Memory Controller
    • Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
  • Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
    • 120 stream processing units
      • Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
      • Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
      • Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
    • 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
    • Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
    • Shader instruction and constant caches
    • Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
    • Up to 128 textures per pixel
    • Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
    • DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
    • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
    • Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
    • Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
    • Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
    • Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
    • Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
    • 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
    • Physics processing support
  • Full support for Microsoft® DirectX 10.0
    • Shader Model 4.0
    • Geometry Shaders
    • Stream Output
    • Integer and Bitwise Operations
    • Alpha to Coverage
    • Constant Buffers
    • State Objects
    • Texture Arrays
  • Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
    • High performance vertex cache
    • Programmable tessellation unit
    • Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
    • Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
  • Anti-aliasing features
    • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
    • Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
    • Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
    • Temporal anti-aliasing
    • Gamma correct
    • Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
    • All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
  • Texture filtering features
    • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
    • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
    • Bicubic filtering
    • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
    • Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
    • Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
    • Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
  • CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology
    • Acale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
    • Integrated compositing engine
    • High performance dual channel interconnect
  • ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
    • Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
      • High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
    • Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
      • Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
    • Avivo Video Post Processor
      • Color space conversion
      • Chroma subsampling format conversion
      • Horizontal and vertical scaling
      • Gamma correction
    • High Quality Video Post Processing
      • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
      • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
      • Detail enhancement
      • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2)
      • Bad edit correction
    • Two independent display controllers
      • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
      • Full 30-bit display processing
      • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
      • Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
      • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
      • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
      • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
      • Hardware cursor
    • Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
      • Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at resolutions up to 2560x1600
      • Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
    • Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
      • Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15367
    • HDMI output support
      • Supports resolutions up to 1920x1080
      • Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
    • Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder
      • Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
      • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
      • Underscan and overscan compensation
    • MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
    • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
    • VGA mode support on all display outputs
    • PCI Express x16 bus interface
    • OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Radeon HD 2400 Family
Features and Specifications

  • 180 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
  • 64-bit DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
  • Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
    • 40 stream processing units
      • Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
      • Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
      • Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
    • 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
    • Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
    • Shader instruction and constant caches
    • Up to 16 texture fetches per clock cycle
    • Up to 128 textures per pixel
    • Fully associative vertex/texture cache design
    • DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
    • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
    • Fully associative texture & Z/stencil cache designs
    • Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
    • Lossless Z & stencil compression
    • 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
    • Physics processing support
  • Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10
    • Shader Model 4.0
    • Geometry Shaders
    • Stream Output
    • Integer and Bitwise Operations
    • Alpha to Coverage
    • Constant Buffers
    • State Objects
    • Texture Arrays
  • Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
    • Programmable tessellation unit
    • Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
    • Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
  • Anti-aliasing features
    • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 4 samples per pixel)
    • Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
    • Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
    • Temporal anti-aliasing
    • Gamma correct
    • Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
    • All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
  • Texture filtering features
    • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
    • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
    • Bicubic filtering
    • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
    • Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
    • Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
    • Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

 
  • CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology
    • Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
    • Integrated compositing engine
    • High performance dual channel interconnect
  • ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
    • Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
      • High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
    • Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
      • Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
    • Avivo Video Post Processor
      • Color space conversion
      • Chroma subsampling format conversion
      • Horizontal and vertical scaling
      • Gamma correction
    • High Quality Video Post Processing
      • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
      • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
      • Detail enhancement
      • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
      • Bad edit correction
    • Two independent display controllers
        • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
      • Full 30-bit display processing
      • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
      • Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
      • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
      • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
      • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
      • Hardware cursor
    • Two integrated DVI display outputs
      • Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)
      • Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)
      • Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
    • Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
      • Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
    • HDMI output support
      • Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
      • Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
    • Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder
      • Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
      • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
      • Underscan and overscan compensation
    • MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
    • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
    • VGA mode support on all display outputs
    • PCI Express x16 bus interface
    • OpenGL 2.0 support

There is some pertinent information related to today's launch available on our site that we recommend you read, to get familiar with ATI's R600 GPU, their previous GPU architectures, and their key features. The Radeon HD 2600 XT, 2600 Pro, and 2400 XT are derivatives of the R600, and such they have a number of key features in common that we've already covered in much greater detail. The article we suggest you peruse include:

If you haven't already done so, we recommend scanning through our 2900 XT / R600 coverage, our CrossFire Multi-GPU technology preview, the Radeon X1950 Pro with Native CrossFire article, and the X1K family review. In those four pieces, we cover a large number of the features offered by the new Radeon HD 2600 / 2400 series and explain many of benefits of DirectX 10. We recommended reading these articles because there is quite a bit of background information in them that'll lay the foundation for what we're going to showcase here today.

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