AMD Radeon

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Radeon logo since 2019

AMD Radeon , formerly ATI Radeon , is a brand name of AMD that is used to market graphics cards and graphics chips. In the professional graphics card segment, the name AMD FirePro is used.

history

Old ATI Radeon Graphics emblem
older Radeon logo
Radeon logo from 2016 to 2019

Since 2000, ATI Technologies has been calling its new graphics cards and graphics chips outside the market for professional graphics cards "Radeon", while the name Rage was previously used. The last Rage cards only delivered a mediocre performance and were plagued by driver problems, so the decision was made to use the new brand name. AMD kept the brand name Radeon after taking over ATI Technologies. The original part of the company name ATI was discontinued as a brand name with the takeover.

Since the Radeon HD 6000 Series , the brand ATI is not used more since AMD wants to make the brand portfolio under the restructuring clearer. The names Radeon and FireGL are to be retained as AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro.

General

Radeon graphics cards are compatible with Macintosh and IBM PC-compatible computers .

In addition to the desktop models, there is also the ATI Mobility Radeon series, which was specially designed for notebooks and is intended to guarantee extended battery life through various power-saving technologies .

The Radeon graphics cards had a global market share of 18% in the second quarter of 2014. The largest competitor in the GPU business with two thirds of the global market share is Intel.

Naming

Radeon graphics cards are available in different model series, which are identified with a four-digit number. The first digit stands for the generation of the graphics processor, with the “ 9000 series ” being followed by the “ X series ”. It is believed that the "X" stands for the Roman 10 . In the first Radeon generations, the first digit was based on the DirectX version supported (e.g. DirectX 9 for Radeon 9700). However, with the introduction of the Radeon 9000 and 9000 Pro (which are based on the architecture of the Radeon 8500 and only support DirectX 8.1), this scheme was abandoned for marketing reasons.

The card is then divided into a service segment with the second and possibly third digit. The performance is then assessed even more precisely using various letter abbreviations. This leads to a very large variety of model names, so that it is not always easy to judge which card does better.

With the successor to the Radeon X1xxx, the naming scheme was changed. The “X” at the beginning of the name was replaced by “HD” to underline the high definition capabilities of the card. With the start of the HD-3xxx series, the letter abbreviations were also removed; instead, the generation is indicated with the first number and the performance class with the second and third numbers.

A new naming scheme has been used since 2013. With the start of the R200 series , an R5, R7 or R9 (R for Radeon) was placed at the beginning of the model name in order to roughly differentiate between the performance classes. This is followed by a three-digit number, the first digit of which indicates the generation, the second and third digit the performance class or the chip used. An "X" at the end often stands for the full expansion of the graphics chip. The dual GPU chip R9 295X2 is a special feature, in which the X2 does not represent a full configuration, but rather a double chip configuration.

Graphics cards with Radeon chips are - apart from the United States and Canada - almost exclusively produced and sold by third parties. However, AMD provides so-called "reference designs" in which the circuit board and fan layout is set on a graphics card. This is taken over by many manufacturers at the beginning of the sale and later replaced by their own cooling solutions and even their own board layouts.

driver

AMD Catalyst and AMD Radeon Software Crimson

The drivers for Radeon graphics cards are continuously developed. With the takeover of the series through the purchase of ATI by AMD, AMD initially took over the software package AMD Catalyst , which contained the drivers and configuration software . Under Linux , the driver family was then sold under the name fglrx and was not renamed to Catalyst 7.11 until 2007, which means that the name and versioning coincided with the variant used under Windows . Updates were usually released monthly, with the version number made up of the year (e.g. 7 for 2007) and the month (e.g. 11). In 2015, Catalyst was replaced by the AMD Radeon Software Crimson package . Among other things, the now 11-year-old Catalyst Control Center was replaced by new software that was not based on Microsoft's .NET Framework as before , but functioned on the basis of Qt . Although this fact favored a migration of the configuration software to Linux, this did not materialize, and together with the promises made by AMD regarding driver performance that were not kept , the switch to Crimson did not improve the drivers on Linux.

Alternative drivers

The fglrx driver offered under Linux is proprietary software and therefore cannot be supplied with the open-source system for licensing reasons . Instead, the development of the alternative open source driver radeon under Mesa 3D began by the freedesktop.org project and the X.Org Foundation . Despite AMD's announcement in 2007 that it would publish its specifications and the subsequent development of an alternative open source driver radeonhd , in which AMD employees also contributed, AMD was unable to assert itself against the direct competition. The alternative driver radeonhd is also part of Mesa 3D, but it only supports a limited selection of chipsets. On radeon followed by other drivers for different chipsets : 200 , r300g , r600g and radeonsi. The latter has survived beyond the modern Graphic Core Next chipsets and is therefore the latest free driver in user space . Alternatively, AMD also offers a modern proprietary driver in the user space. This is sold under the name AMDGPU-PRO and replaces the modules from Mesa 3D.

At the kernel level, the earlier proprietary fglrx module was initially replaced by the open-source radeon driver, which was then replaced in later chipsets by the modern AMDGPU driver (as of 2018) . The kernel modules are addressed by the respective drivers from Mesa 3D or AMDGPU-PRO via libdrm .

Linux also has two free drivers for Vulkan : AMD announced an open source driver for the API, but it did not initially appear. As a result, a Red Hat employee decided to publish his own implementation. This became part of Mesa 3D under the name radv . The later released driver amdvlk offers the official alternative. Due to the open handling of free implementations and the active assistance of AMD, Radeon cards have also become relevant again for Linux users in the gaming area in recent years .

Graphics processors

The graphics processors (GPUs) in Radeon products have an identifier of the form R xxx . In the R V xxx variants, techniques are implemented that reduce production costs (from English v alue ). The performance of the RV xxx processors is sometimes considerably reduced. The numbering is not always chronological, and processors with higher numbers do not necessarily have better graphics performance.

Sometimes different graphics cards are based on the same GPU and are only restricted by internal mechanisms. B. Pipelines blocked or the clock rate reduced (see suffixes). Often times, different GPUs are used for the same model - e.g. B. if there is a newer revision of the chip or it has been revised.

It should be noted that all GPUs with a native AGP interface can also be used on PCI graphics cards without any problems. The situation is similar with GPUs with a native PCIe interface : These can also be used for AGP graphics cards using the ATI Rialto bridge chip . This was mainly used during the period when the graphics card market was gradually switching from AGP to PCIe; today this form of adaptation is no longer relevant.

Embedded graphics processors

AMD also offers graphics processors for the embedded segment. For these models, AMD guarantees a long-term availability of five years.

Stream processors

Thanks to the high basic performance in the calculation of floating point numbers , modern graphics processors are also suitable for running floating point applications. The performance in this special application area by far exceeds all currently available x86 processors. The GPUs become much faster specialized coprocessors of the CPUs. Starting with the Radeon X1000 series , the graphics processors can, for example, take on computing tasks for the Folding @ home project . The Stream APP module for the first stream generation with RV6xx cores was then replaced by OpenCL drivers for RV7xx and higher.

The open interface OpenCL is supported and accelerates many processes with a high proportion for parallel execution with many small cores compared to CPUs with few large cores. The processors of the RV7xx series support OpenCL 1.1. Cards with RV8xx and RV9xx support OpenCL 1.2. The current GCN architecture of the first generation supports OpenCL 1.2 with some extensions. The current GCN architecture from the 2nd generation supports OpenCL 2.0 and 2.1, as well as OpenCL 2.2 in the future if driver development is required.

Models

Desktop

Mobile area

Embedded systems

Chipsets

AMD also releases chipsets with integrated GPUs . These integrated graphics units are marketed under the name "ATI Radeon Xpress". The full name of the AMD chipsets differs from the name of the graphics unit.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Statista: Market shares of the leading manufacturers in terms of sales of graphics chips worldwide from the 2nd quarter of 2009 to the 2nd quarter of 2014 , accessed on November 16, 2014
  2. ↑ http://alt.3dcenter.org/news/2002/woche28.php#2002-07-08
  3. ↑ AMD Drivers and Support. 2019, accessed August 22, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Michael Larabel: AMD Catalyst 7.11 Linux Driver. In: Phoronix.com. November 21, 2007, accessed November 17, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Hassan Mujtaba: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition Drivers Officially Launching on 24th November to Public - Features Advanced Look and Tons of Features. In: wccftech.com. November 5, 2015, accessed November 17, 2018 .
  6. ↑ Chris Hoffman: AMD's Radeon Software Crimson doesn't live up to the hype on Linux. In: pcworld.com. November 25, 2015, accessed November 17, 2018 .
  7. ↑ x.org/radeon. In: X.org Wiki. September 15, 2013, accessed November 17, 2018 .
  8. ↑ x.org/radeonhd. In: X.org Wiki. July 1, 2013, accessed November 17, 2018 .
  9. ↑ Chris Hoffman: Why Nvidia graphics cards are the worst for open-source, but the best for Linux gaming. In: pcworld.com. April 17, 2015, accessed November 17, 2018 .
  10. ↑ a b x.org/RadeonFeature. In: X.org Wiki. August 2, 2018, accessed November 18, 2018 .
  11. ↑ Chris Hoffman: AAMD's gaming-optimized AMDGPU-PRO driver for Linux is in beta. In: pcworld.com. May 30, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018 .
  12. ↑ Michael Larabel: RADV: A Community Open-Source Effort To Get Vulkan Working On Radeon. In: phoronix.com. July 19, 2016, accessed November 18, 2018 .
  13. ↑ Thorsten Leemhuis: Graphics hardware for Linux users. In: heise.de. October 24, 2018, accessed November 18, 2018 .
  14. ↑ AMD embedded graphics processors. (No longer available online.) AMD , formerly the original ; Retrieved September 15, 2011 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.amd.com  
  15. ↑ AMD Radeon ™ 5700 Series. Retrieved September 29, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Experience your adrenaline rush For the new Radeon ™ RX 5700 series. Retrieved September 29, 2019 .
  17. ↑ AMD Radeon VII. Retrieved September 29, 2019 .
Graphics solutions from AMD (formerly ATI Technologies )
Desktop

Rage  • FireMV  • FireGL  • FirePro  • Radeon  • Radeon Xpress

Mobile and ultra mobile

Mobility Radeon  • Radeon M  • Imageon  • Xilleon

Others

Radeon Embedded  • Rialto  • CrossFireX  • HyperMemory  • Avivo  • Unified Video Decoder  • XvBA  • AMD Mantle  • TrueAudio

Radeon series from AMD (formerly ATI Technologies )
DirectX 7

7000

DirectX 8

8000

DirectX 9

9000  • X  • X1000

DirectX 10

HD 2000  • HD 3000  • HD 4000

DirectX 11

HD 5000  • HD 6000  • HD 7000  • HD 8000

DirectX 12

R200  • R300  • 400  • 500  • Vega  • 5000