Introduction
For the longest time, getting updated drivers for computer hardware on Linux has been one of the major issues holding back its adoption rate on the desktop. While servers and enterprises have embraced the open source operating system early in its development, the barriers on the desktop arena are higher, due in part to the dominance of Microsoft's Windows. Newer and more user friendly distributions like Ubuntu have helped to increase the user base but even the tech savvy among us will be stumped if there are no drivers released in a timely fashion to support their hardware.
Therefore, it was a massive boost to the Linux community when AMD announced last week that it has plans to develop open source drivers for its Radeon graphics cards. True to its words, the
GPU specifications for the RV630 has been released for download
and possibly, open source drivers are set to follow soon. In the mean time, there's also a new
proprietary driver available
available for the Radeon HD series for Linux users. Hopefully, such a move will force NVIDIA to do the same for its own graphics chipsets so that Linux users can fully utilize their hardware and in a more timely fashion.
So perhaps it's fitting that today, we're looking at the RV630 core, in the form of a Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR4 card from MSI. It's a 'Diamond' edition card, which those familiar with MSI's products should know that it is not the standard issue version, but a premium one that usually has additional features. With higher clock speeds and a two-slot cooler, this Radeon HD card is already off to a decent start. Before we get to it, here are its specifications below:
MSI's Diamond edition cards are always a notch better than the standard and this Radeon HD 2600 XT does that by having higher, overclocked speeds.
|
MSI RX2600XT Diamond Technical Specifications
| Graphics
Engine |
- ATI Radeon Radeon HD
2600 XT GPU (RV630)
- 390 million
transistors on 65nm fabrication process
- Core Clock: 850MHz
- 24 shader
processors (120 stream processing units)
- 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
-
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
-
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
- OpenGL 2.0 support
|
| Graphics
Memory
|
- 128-bit 8-channel
GDDR4 memory interface
- 256MB DDR4 SDRAM
- Memory Clock = 2300MHz
DDR
|
| RAMDAC |
- Dual
integrated dual-link DVI transmitters
- Each supports 18-,
24-, and 30-bit digital displays at
all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600
(dual-link DVI)
- Each includes a
dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip
key storage for high resolution playback of protected content
- Dual
integrated 30-bit per channel 400MHz RAMDACs
-
Each supports analog displays connected by
VGA at all
resolutions up to 2048x1536
|
| I/O Faceplate
Connectors
|
- 2 x DVI-I connectors
- 1 x mini-DIN connector
|
| Drivers &
Software |
- Driver support for
Windows XP/Vista
- MSI Multimedia
(Drivers & Utilities)
|
| Other Information
|
- At
least 400W PSU recommended
- 1GB
of System memory recommended
- Native
PCI Express x16 bus interface
|
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