Radeon - Processor Generations

Processor Generations

Retail/card series name Chip series Manufacturing process Graphics APIs support Notes
DirectX OpenGL
R7000-R7200 R100 180 nm DirectX 7.0 OpenGL 1.3 ATI's first graphics processor to be fully DirectX 7 compliant, first introduced in 2000. R100 brought with it large gains in bandwidth and fill-rate efficiency through the new HyperZ technology. Initial models included Radeon SDR, DDR, LE(DDR) and 7000/VE.
R7500 RV200 150 nm Die-shrink of the former R100 with some core logic tweaks for clockspeed, introduced in 2001. The only release was the Radeon 7500.
R8500,R9000-R9250 R200 DirectX 8.1 OpenGL 1.4 ATI's second generation Radeon. This design included ATI's first programmable pixel shader architecture and introduced the more advanced pixel shader 1.4. This line includes Radeon 8500, 9000, 9200 and 9250.
R9500-R9800, X300-X600, X1050 R300 DirectX 9.0 OpenGL 2.0 ATI's DirectX 9.0 technology, released in 2002, incorporated pixel shader. Included in this generation are Radeon 9500–9800, X300–X600, and X1050.
X700-850 R420 130 nm DirectX 9.0b While heavily based upon the previous generation, this line included extensions to the Shader Model 2 feature-set. Shader Model 2b, the specification ATI and Microsoft defined with this generation, offered somewhat more shader program flexibility. This generation's technology is used in Radeon X700–X850.
X1300-1950 R520 90/80 nm DirectX 9.0c ATI's DirectX 9.0c series of graphics cards, with complete Shader Model 3.0 support. Launched in October 2005, this series brought a number of enhancements including the floating point render target technology necessary for HDR rendering with anti-aliasing. Cards released include X1300–X1950. These were the last graphics cards to be released with the prefix 'X'- new cards use the prefixes 'HD', although sometimes called 'R'.
HD2000-HD3000 R600 65/55 nm DirectX 10.0/
DirectX 10.1 (RV670)		 OpenGL 3.3 ATI's first series of ATI Radeon GPUs supporting the Direct3D 10.0 specification and the company's second graphics solution to employ unified shader technology. Releases of this platform include the HD 2400, HD 2600 and HD 2900. There are also products supporting DirectX 10.1, known as the HD 3000 series, with a die shrink.
HD4000 R700 55 nm DirectX 10.1 Based on the R600 architecture. Mostly a bolstered card with many more stream processors, with improvements to power consumption and GDDR5 support for the high-end RV770 and RV740(HD4770) chips. It arrived in late June 2008. The HD 4850 and HD 4870 have 800 stream processors and GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory, respectively. The 4890 was a refresh of 4870 with the same amount of stream processors yet higher clock rates due to refinements. The 4870x2 has 1600 stream processors and GDDR5 memory on an effective 512-bit memory bus with 230.4 Gbit/s video memory bandwidth available.
HD5000 Evergreen 40 nm DirectX 11 OpenGL 4.1 The series was launched on September 23, 2009. It features a 40 nm fabrication process (instead of 55 nm before, except HD4770(R7V40)), with more stream cores and compatibility with the next major version of the DirectX API, DirectX 11, which launched on October 22, 2009 along with Microsoft Windows 7. The Rxxx/RVxxx codename scheme was scrapped entirely. The first cards out of the gate are the 5870 and 5850. ATI has released beta drivers that introduces full OpenGL 4.0 support on the all variants of this series.
HD6000 Northern Islands This is the first series to be marketed solely under the "AMD" brand. It features a 3rd generation 40 nm design, rebalancing the existing architecture with redesigned shaders to give it better performance. It was released first on October 22, 2010, in the form of the 6850 and 6870. 3D output is enabled with HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.
HD7000 Southern Islands 40/28 nm DirectX 11/
DirectX 11.1		 OpenGL 4.2 Features a new compute architecture known as "Graphics Core Next", along with the VLIW4 architecture utilized in the previous generation. The first card, the 7970, was released on January 9, 2012.

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