ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Preview

ATI has been on tear the past few months, releasing a number of new and interesting products. Since late September / early October of this year, we've been presented with Radeon X850 CrossFire and requisite CrossFire capable dual-PEG slot motherboards to go along with it, a whole series of products based on the new X1K family of GPUs, and most recently the All-In-Wonder Radeon X1800 XL. Not to mention a handful of other products we can't tell you about just yet. It seems the company is doing all it can to keep the folks talking about ATI as we head into the holiday buying season.

Today the company is introducing yet another new product, the Mobility Radeon X1600. As its name implies, the Mobility Radeon X1600 is a mobile variant of the 12-pipe Radeon X1600. We recently met with ATI in NYC to take the Mobility Radeon X1600 for a spin using a brand new notebook from Asus, the A7G. The experience turned out to be quite enjoyable.  Read on for our quick-take on ATI's new mainstream mobile GPU. You may be surprised by what you see.

ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 Features & Specifications

Features - ATI Radeon X1600 • 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process • Twelve pixel shader processors • Five vertex shader processors • 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface • Native PCI Express x16 bus interface • Dynamic Voltage Control Ring Bus Memory Controller • 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads • Programmable intelligent arbitration logic • Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs • Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test • Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) • Fast Z-Buffer Clear • Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine • Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware • Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations • Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control • Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency • 3Dc+ texture compression _o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats _o High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats • Multiple Render Target (MRT) support • Render to vertex buffer support • Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0 Advanced Image Quality Features • 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing • 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing • 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes _o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling _o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes _o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode _o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions • 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes _o Up to 128-tap texture filtering _o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options • High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo Video and Display Engine • High performance programmable video processor _o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding _o DXVA support _o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering _o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion _o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing _o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion) • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time • HDR tone mapping acceleration _o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output • Flexible display support _o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters _o DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready _o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs _o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output _o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color) _o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display _o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs _o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays _o Xilleon™ TV encoder for high quality analog output _o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays _o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays _o Fast, glitch-free mode switching _o VGA mode support on all outputs • Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550 High Performance Memory Controller • Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs • Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test • Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) • Fast Z-Buffer Clear • Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering Feature Spotlight: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600

     
The Mobility Radeon X1600

The Mobility Radeon X1600 is the first mobile GPU to come from ATI to be based on the company's recently introduced X1000 graphics technology. This part is designed for high "Performance per Watt" and is targeted for use in Performance Thin notebooks. It features ATI's new AVIVO video engine and an enhanced version of "PowerPlay", which is a specific set of featuers meant to lower power consumption and extend battery life.  We should also note that the Mobility Radeon X1600 will be fully supported in the Catalyst Mobility driver suite, so notebook users won't be left waiting for driver updates.