The ATI Radeon X600 Pro is the first chipset in the world for the PCI-Express. That is the reason why it can be listed as a member of a new family of advanced video cards.
The video card ATI Radeon X600 supports an interface PCI-Express x16. This interface provides a twice higher capacity, comparing with the AGP 8x. The Radeon x600 pro 256mb has an increased capacity of the memory up to 12 GB per second. It uses the 128-bit memory DDR1 with a volume from 128 MB up to 256 MB. There are four parallel conveyors for 3D rendering. The video card also has two conveyors for programmable vertex shaders. The ATI Radeon X600 Pro has a full support of the API DirectX 9.0. It also supports another popular API OpenGL 2.0.
The new Radeon video card has doubled a speed of data transfer in two directions against AGP 8x bus. One-chip architecture ATI has a special design for the optimal power management and higher reliability of the system.
The video card has advanced properties for 2D and 3D graphical applications. The technology SmartShader 2.0 provides the highest level of realism in the newest 2D/3D games and applications. There is also a support of programmable vertex and pixel shaders Microsoft DirectX 9.0 on a hardware level.
Another advanced technology of ATI Radeon X600 is SmoothVISION 2.1. This technology improves a quality of image by increasing of sharpness and processing background details with low resolutions. You can change settings of SmoothVISION with the ATI Catalyst software. These settings are available in the Control Panel.
The ATI Radeon X600 supports the anti-aliasing mode 2x/4x/6x. It uses a multi-sample algorithm with a gamma-correction, programmable palettes and centered sampling. The video card provides a color compression without looses at any resolutions up to 6:10. A temporary anti-aliasing is also available for the new Radeon.
The video card supports modes of anisotropic filtering 2x/4x/8x/16x and 128-channel texture filtering. There is also an advanced feature ? a bilinear or three-linear adaptive algorithm with optimizations by the performance or quality.
There are other interesting sides of ATI Radeon X600. The Hyper Z 3 technology, for instance, provides a maximal performance without processing objects that are not visible for a user on the screen. Enhancements in the third generation of Hyper Z are directed on improving a performance in resources consuming 2D/3D applications and games. The technology allows compressing without looses with the maximal resolution 48:1. There is an opportunity for fast clearing of the Z buffer. The Z-cache is optimized for the shadows rendering in the real-time.
The video card is provided with the VideoShader technology. It means that it has a ?seamless? integration of pixel shaders to video in a real time mode. The new Radeon has a technology of protection from the video blocking FullStream in formats Real, DivX and WMV9. It also possesses a technology for filtering and noise canceling VideoSoap for captured video. The Radeon X600 uses an acceleration of coding and decoding MPEG 1/4.
Additionally, it supports the DXVA, has a hardware compensation for movement, the iDCT, DCT and transformation of missed colors. You will also enjoy the decoding of DTV/HDTV to all the formats and the YprPb output for a direct transfer to the HDTV display.