Yesterday ATI announced its new line of GPUs, the X1K family. This family includes the flagship Radeon X1800 XT and XL GPUs (codenamed R520), the mid-range Radeon X1600 XT and Pro GPUs (code named RV530), and the mainstream Radeon X1300 and X1300 Pro GPUs (code named RV515). For a detailed overview, see the articles at ExtremeTech or Beyond3D. ATI has also announced preliminary plans to enable GPGPU development by publishing a detailed spec and a thin abstraction interface for programming the new GPUs.

Excerpted from GPU Gems 2, “The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture” (Chapter 30) describes the architecture of the GeForce 6 Series family of GPUs, including details on the overall system architecture, vertex processor, fragment processor, and various other features. (Emmett Kilgariff and Randima Fernando. “The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture”, in GPU Gems 2, Addison-Wesley 2005.)

3Dlabs Inc. has introduced its PCI Express-based Wildcat Realizm 800. A professional PCI Express-based graphics accelerator, the Wildcat Realizm 800 features a Wildcat Realizm Vertex/Scalability Unit (VSU) and dual Wildcat Realizm Visual Processing Units (VPU). The Wildcat Realizm 800 and the new AGP 8x-based Wildcat Realizm 100 and 200 deliver programmability via the OpenGL Shading Language and Microsoft DirectX 9.0 HLSL shader programs. The Wildcat Realizm 800 is slated for availability in the third calendar quarter of this year at a suggested retail price of $2799. (3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm Family)

NVIDIA Corporation recently introduced its new GeForce 6800 GPU (codename NV40). Among the new features of this GPU are 64-bit floating point texture filtering and blending and support for the D3D vertex and pixel shader 3.0 standard, enabling full dynamic branching and looping in programmable shaders. The GeForce 6800 features 16 pixel pipelines. The improved pixel shader performance of the GeForce 6800 architecture should provide excellent performance for GPGPU applications. NVIDIA report that they have seen over a 3x speedup on a GPU-based Navier-Stokes fluid flow simulation (compared to an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950).

ATI Technologies recently introduced its new RADEON X800 line of graphics cards (codename R420). Among the new features of these cards are 3Dc, a new compression scheme for normal maps, and support for the D3D ps_2_b pixel shader specification. The ps_2_b shader model allows for pixel shaders up to 512 instructions long with 32 temporary registers. The RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition features 16 pixel pipelines while the RADEON X800 PRO has 12 pixel pipelines. The improved pixel shader performance of the RADEON X800 architecture should provide excellent performance for GPGPU applications. ATI report they have seen up to a 2.5x speedup on an implementation of GPU-based fluid flow simulation (compared to an ATI RADEON 9800 XT).