ATI Technologies seems to have changed some of specifications of its RADEON 9100 IGP core-logic. According to X-bit labs’ investigation, the company has disabled its SURROUNDVIEW technology that could allow setting-up three displays on one RADEON 9100 IGP-based system when an add-in RADEON graphics cards used.

SURROUNDVIEW was among the most interesting capabilities of ATI RADEON 9100 IGP platform. The feature was meant to sport for up to three displays when using an AGP graphics card powered by ATI’s RADEON-series GPU. Three displays option is very interesting for those, who do not require really powerful 3D graphics, such as users in the financial community, but are interested in using more than two displays at the same time.

X-bit labs’ analysts were pretty upset about the absence of SURROUNDVIEW technology on the Sapphire AXION 9100 IGP (RS300-MA26) mainboard we tested recently. According to a Sapphire Technology representative, ATI Technologies had decided to disable this capability for the time being and it is hard to say whether it will be available sometime in the future or not. The source of the problem, e.g. software or hardware, is also not recognized at present.

The RADEON 9100 IGP support desktop Intel Socket 478 processors with 400, 533 and 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus with or without Hyper-Threading technology, including the upcoming Prescott CPUs. The 9100 IGP chipset from ATI features dual-channel PC3200 DDR SDRAM memory support providing up to 6.40GB/s of peak memory bandwidth and up to 4GB of DDR SDRAM main memory. The biggest advantage of the RADEON 9100 IGP is probably its graphics core that is based on the RADEON 9200 architecture and supports DirectX 8.1 features in addition to HyperZ technologies to ensure graphics memory bandwidth is used more efficiently. The IGP allows installing AGP 8x graphics cards as well.

To learn more about peculiarities of the RADEON 9100 IGP as well as find out its performance, check out our ATI RADEON 9100 IGP Integrated Chipset Review.