• „Quality AMD Radeon Graphics means… Play the Game as Originally Intended”

    AMD recently announced it's new entry-level model in the HD 6000 series, the HD 6450 based on the Caicos-ASIC. It is a nice little PCIe card with 160 Shader-ALUs, 8 TMUs and 4 ROPs all connected with a half GiB of GDDR5- or a full GiB DDR3-RAM via 64 parallel memory bits. The GPU is supposed to sport 370 million transistors and is produced (not manufactured; there's nothing done manually in the process!) in a 40nm process at TSMC. It still uses the known VLIW5-architecture, has UVD3 for decent video capabilities even for HD video. Depending on core clock, which can vary between 625 and 750 MHz depending on SKU, these specs allow for 2.5 to 3.0 Gigapixels of fillrate and twice the amount for texturing operations. Also, the GPU achieves 200 to 240 GFLOPS of processing power, some of which is put to use to enhance video playback for generic HD, Adobe Flash and DivX clips.

    But more importantly than just another HTPC card, because that's quite frankly what it is, AMD also announced their new slogan dubbed „AMD Quality Radeon Graphics” to differentiate itself from the more powerful than ever integrated graphics featured in intels mid-range processors of the Core i-2000 series.

    Part of this Initiative is a slide in the presentation deck where AMD describes „Quality AMD Radeon Graphics” meaning „Play the Game as Originally Intended”. You can see the slide for example over at Computerbase.de's image gallery.

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    Now, I have expressed my doubts and fears about the tessellation control switch, which AMD integrated into their latest Catalyst driver suites almost three months ago. In short: While up until now not used, AMD could opt to integrate profiles for lessening the tessellation load for certain games and applications as the drivers default. I welcome the possibility to have the option to do this on an individual and user-discrentionary basis but I thought and still think it must not become the default driver behaviour.

    With „Quality AMD Radeon Graphics means… Play the Game as Originally Intended” AMD now obviously has asserted that they share my view of things and I will mark this day in my calendar as a good day for PC gaming! Thank you AMD, but I'll hold you to your word!