As you know, the AGP 8x standard proposed by Intel can provide twice the bandwidth of the currently mainstream AGP 4x. Curiously enough, the unpretentious SiS was the first to implement this standard in its Xabre graphics chips family just over a year ago, while the graphics giants, ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation, were a bit slower. Next came ATI with its brilliant RADEON 9700 PRO, the first graphics chip in this world to feature DirectX 9.0 support. NVIDIA followed shortly with its NV18 and NV28 chips. So, only the value cards from ATI in the RADEON 8500/9100 and RADEON 9000 families (R200 and R250 chips, respectively) couldn’t boast the new standard for a while.

But now, a new chip (RV280) comes instead of RV250. In fact, it only differs from the predecessor by its AGP 8x support, nothing else. ATI christened this chip as RADEON 9200, which is confusing enough, although such confusion has become a trademark of ATI: the 9100 graphics chip family (R200) performs nearly always faster than cards based on RV250/RV280 (RADEON 9000/9200). An innocent user might be misled to think that RADEON 9200 is faster in 3D applications than RADEON 9100, but that’s absolutely wrong. Moreover, we have the same picture with RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9600 PRO: the 9600 PRO based solutions are always slower than the 9500 PRO based ones. Let this be the shame of all marketing folk at ATI…

Now, let’s discuss the technical characteristics of RV280 graphics chip.

Closer Look at RV280: What RADEON 9200 Has and Can?

• 0.15 micron manufacturing technology;
• Four rendering pipelines with one texturing unit in each;
• Memory interface: 128-bit for SDR/DDR SDRAM/SGRAM;
• One 128-bit memory controller. RADEON 8500 uses two independent 64-bit controllers, and RADEON 9700 – four 64-bit ones;
• Vertex shaders version 1.1. Polygon processing speed of up to 40 million primitives per second;
• Pixel shaders version 1.4 (SmartShader technology);
• HyperZ technology optimizes the use of the Z-buffer and thus increases the effective graphics memory bandwidth;
• Full-screen anti-aliasing with an optional jitter mask to improve the quality of the image (SmoothVision technology);
• Hardware tessellation (TruForm technology);
• Anisotropic filtering of an up to 16x level;
• 3D textures support;
• Relief rendering with EMBM and Dot Product methods;
• Texture compression support;
• Hardware MPEG-2 decoding (motion compensation, Fourier inversion, adaptive de-interlacing);
• FullStream technology: video streams filter for elimination of “block” artifacts. So far, for the RealVideo format only;
• AGP 8x support;
• Two 350MHz RAMDACs;
• 165MHz TMDS transmitter;
• Maximum supported resolution: 2048x1532x32 for every VGA display.

As you see we have a typical value graphics chip with DirectX 8.1 support and some interesting features like FullStream technology. Unfortunately, RealPlayer only supports this technology so far. DixX Player, which is a more popular multimedia player from the DivX bundle, also supports it since 2.1 version, but only in cards based on R300/R350 and RV350 chips.