Desktop products
The R600 family is called the Radeon HD 2000 series, with the enthusiast segment being the Radeon HD 2900 series which originally comprised the Radeon HD 2900 XT with GDDR3 memory released on May 14, and the higher-clocked GDDR4 version in early July.
The mainstream and budget segment products were the Radeon HD 2600 and Radeon HD 2400 series respectively, both launched June 28, 2007. [8]
Previously there were no HD 2000 series products being offered in the performance segment while ATI used models from the previous generation to address that target market; this situation did not change until the release of variants of the Radeon HD 2900 series, the Radeon HD 2900 Pro and GT, which filled the gap of the performance market for a short period of time.
Radeon HD 2400
The Radeon HD 2400 series was based on the codenamed RV610 GPU. It had 180 million transistors on a 65 nm fabrication process. The Radeon HD 2400 series used a 64-bit-wide memory bus. [9] The die size is 85 mm2. [10] The official PCB design implements only a passive-cooling heatsink instead of a fan, and official claims of power consumption are as little as 35 W.[ citation needed ] The core has 16 kiB unified vertex/texture cache away from dedicated vertex cache and L1/L2 texture cache used in higher end model.
Reports has that the first batch of the RV610 core (silicon revision A12), only being released to system builders, has a bug that hindered the UVD from working properly, but other parts of the die operated normally. Those products were officially supported with the release of Catalyst 7.10 driver, which the cards were named as Radeon HD 2350 series. [11]
Several reports from owners of HD 2400 Pro suggest the card do not fully support hardware decoding for all H.264/VC-1 videos. The device driver, even with the latest stable version, seem to only honor hardware decoding for formats specified in the Blu-ray and HD-DVD specification. As a result of such restriction, the card is not deemed very useful for hardware video decoding since the majority of the H.264/VC-1 videos on the net are not encoded in those formats (even though the hardware itself is fully capable of doing such decoding work). This device driver restriction has led to the development of a third party driver patch, "ExDeus ATI HD Registry Tweak", to unlock the potential of HD 2400 Pro for full support of H.264/VC-1 hardware video decoding. [12] [13] [14]
Radeon HD 2600
The Radeon HD 2600 series was based on the codenamed RV630 GPU and packed 390 million transistors on a 65 nm fabrication process. The Radeon HD 2600-series video cards included GDDR3 support, a 128-bit memory ring bus and 4-phase digital PWM, [9] spanning a die size of 153 mm2. [15] Neither of the GDDR3 reference PCI-E designs required additional power connectors whereas the HD 2600 Pro and XT AGP variants required additional power through either 4-pin or 6-pin power connectors, [16] Official claims state that the Radeon HD 2600 series consumes as little as 45 W of power.[ citation needed ]
Radeon HD 2600 X2
The Radeon HD 2600 X2 is a dual-GPU product which includes 2 RV630 dies on a single PCB with a PCI-E bridge splitting the PCI-E ×16 bandwidth into two groups of PCI-E ×8 lanes (each 2.0 Gbit/s). The card provides 4 DVI outputs or HDMI outputs via dongle and supports CrossFire configurations. AMD calls this product the Radeon HD 2600 X2 as seen by some vendors and as observed inside the INF file of Catalyst 7.9 version 8.411. Sapphire and other vendors including PowerColor and GeCube have either announced or demonstrated their respective dual GPU (connected by crossfire) products. [17] Catalyst 7.9 added support for this hardware in September 2007. However, AMD did not provide much publicity to promote it. A vendor may offer cards containing 256 MiB, 512 MiB, or 1 GiB of video memory. Although the memory technology utilized is at a vendor's discretion, most vendors have opted for GDDR3 and DDR2 due to lower manufacturing cost and positioning of this product for the mainstream rather than performance market segment and also a big success.
Radeon HD 2900
The Radeon HD 2900 series was based on the codenamed R600 GPU and was launched on May 14, 2007. R600 packed 700 million transistors on an 80 nm fabrication process and had a 420 mm2 die size. [18] The Radeon HD 2900 XT was launched with 320 Stream Processors and a core clock of 743 MHz. The initial model was released with 512 MB of GDDR3 clocked at 828 MHz (1,656 MHz effective) with a 512-bit interface. A couple months after release ATI released the 1 GB GDDR4 model with a memory frequency of 1,000 MHz (2,000 MHz effective). Performance was on par compared to the 512 MB card. The HD 2900 XT introduced a lot of firsts. It was the first to implement a digital PWM on board (7-phase PWM), first to use an 8-pin PEG connector, and was the first graphics card from ATI to support DirectX 10.
The Radeon HD 2900 Pro was clocked lower at 600 MHz core and 800 MHz memory (1,600 MHz effective), configured with 512 MB of GDDR3 or 1 GB of GDDR4. It was rumored that some of the 1 GB GDDR4 models were manufactured using a 12" cooler borrowed from the prototype HD 2900 XTX. [19] The HD 2900 Pro had both 256-bit and 512-bit interface options for the 512 MB versions of the card. A few AIB partners offered a black and silver cooler exclusive to the 256-bit model of the Pro. [20] [21]
The Radeon HD 2900 GT was a 240 Stream Processor variant clocked the same as the HD 2900 Pro, but with 256 MB of video memory on a 256-bit interface.
