ATI, perhaps mindful of what had happened to 3dfx when they took focus off their "Rampage" processor, abandoned the R250 refresh in favor of finishing off their next-generation DirectX 9.0 card which was released as the Radeon 9700.
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The Radeon 9000 (RV250) was launched alongside the Radeon 9700.
However, within a few months after release, the Parhelia was completely overshadowed by ATI's far faster and fully DirectX 9.0 compliant Radeon 9700.
In terms of supported DirectX features, R420 (codenamed Loki) was very similar to the R300.
It is ATI's first major architectural overhaul since the R300 and is highly optimized for Shader Model 3.0.
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R420 and R300 had nearly identical memory controller designs, with the former being a bug fixed release designed for higher clock speeds.
R300 |