结构 Radeon 8500的基本结构与当时的其他显卡差不多;它拥有四个像素单元,每个像素单元拥有两个纹理单元。它亦支援DirectX 8.1的顶点着色引擎和像素着色引擎,它的两个顶点着色引擎被称为Charisma Engine II,为新的顶点着色程式和旧的DirectX 7硬件T&L都提供出色的效能。"R200"核心was more capable with regards to advanced pixel and vertex shading when compared to the competition at the time (GeForce 3 and 4), supporting DirectX 8.1 (pixel shader 1.4) with Pixel Tapestry II. R200 also had the most advanced memory bandwidth saving hardware of the time onboard, the next version of ATI''''s innovative HyperZ, HyperZ II. The chip was capable of dual-monitor display, through the Hydravision technology. Finally, R200 was equipped with Video Immersion II, ATI''''s advanced video decoding engine with high quality hardware deinterlacing. A DVI-I to component conversion connector was available for home theater enthusiasts. R200支援像素着色器版本1.4,相对1.x版本的设计,这个修订版本是意义重大的。鉴于PS1.2和1.3只是PS1.1的改进版,PS1.4 changed things around quite significantly. Notable instructions include "phase", "texcrd", and "texld". The phase instruction allows a shader to operate on two separate "phases" (2 passes through the hardware), effectively doubling the maximum number of texture addressing and arithmetic instructions, and potentially allowing the number of passes required for an effect to be reduced. This allowed not only more complicated effects, but can also allow a speed boost by utilizing the hardware more efficiently. The "texcrd" instruction moves the texture coordinate values of a texture into the destination register, while the "texld" instruction will load the texture at the coordinates specified in the source register to the destination register.
While R200 lost a texture unit per pipeline compared to R100''''s 2x3 architecture, R200''''s pipelines were far more robust. Each could address a total of 6 texture layers in a single pass if the application was coded to do so. The chip achieved this by a term commonly known as ‘loop-back’. Increasing the flexibility in the number of textures allowed per pass reduced the number of times the card was forced into ‘multi-pass rendering’, a performance draining scenario which increases both the geometry required for the scene (by needing to recalculate the entire scene for the number of times it is passed) and the external memory bandwidth used. Therefore, the chip''''s overall efficiency and performance was increased by enabling more textures to be addressed per pass. Testing using Serious Sam The Second Encounter showed a 16 % performance increase at 1600x1200 resolution with quad texturing and bilinear filtering (in comparison with dual and triple texturing).
特色 利用Radeon 256,ATI透过"RIP" mapping方法引进了各异向性过滤。"RIP" mapping技术上其实不是各异向性过滤,但可提供相似的效果,效能损失亦较少。不幸地,这种方法只在配合双线性过滤时有效。The implementation was also quite angle dependent, meaning that the texture had to be at a certain angle to the viewport or it would not be sharpened. Of course this reduced the computational load, but it also made it possible to see textures that were merely bilinear filtered right beside nearby sharpened textures. Radeon 8500 uses the same technique, but with some refinements to improve quality while still maintaining excellent performance. When anisotropic was enabled on 8500, the boundaries between mip maps, normally easily seen when using bilinear filtering instead of trilinear, were fairly well hidden and the anisotropic mode greatly improves texture sharpness at medium to long distances. Still, the remaining angle dependency and forced-bilinear were controversial from a quality standpoint. NVIDIA''''s GeForce 4 Ti series offered a far more accurate anisotropic implementation, but it also carried with it a heavy performance hit. 8500拥有第一和唯一的ATI硬件加速镶嵌绘图引擎,名为"Truform"。它可以在立体模型上增加多边形,令模型更平滑。这种技术尽管要求开发者支援,但却不能完善支援;不幸地,"Truform"对所有三维渲染方案而言都不是完美的,亦倾向不合意地对物体进行此动作。未来的ATI GPU并没有硬件加速Truform,而只作出支援。未来的GPU一是透过CPU去模拟Truform,一是利用顶点着色程序模拟,两者都不能与8500的Truform单元般有效率。
与UNIX有关的操作系统 ATI没有为基于BSD的操作系统推出过任何驱动程式,但就为执行在Linux中的X Window System提供驱动程式。而基于PowerPC和Mac OS X操作系统的Mac mini和iBook G4就采用了Radeon 9200显卡。 一些Linux用家社区的分支,which prefer to avoid the IP-encumbered ATI drivers due to stability and long term maintainability reasons, still prefer the R200-based chips, as they are among the fastest modern video cards with stable open source drivers.
Windows驱动程式 ATI的Catalyst Drivers支援所有R200以上的Radeon显卡,除了Windows XP x64,直至Catalyst 6.6推出。ATI亦提供旧有驱动程式,Catalyst 6.11则支援9250以下的Radeon显卡。