Radeon

AMD does not distribute Radeon cards directly to consumers (though some exceptions can be found).[5] Instead, it sells Radeon GPUs to third-party manufacturers, who build and sell the Radeon-based video cards to the OEM and retail channels. Manufacturers of the Radeon cards—some of whom also make motherboards—include ASRock, Asus, Biostar, Club 3D, Diamond, Force3D, Gainward, Gigabyte, HIS, MSI, PowerColor, Sapphire, VisionTek, and XFX.

The Radeon, first introduced in 2000, was ATI's first graphics processor to be fully DirectX 7 compliant. R100 brought with it large gains in bandwidth and fill-rate efficiency through the new HyperZ technology.

The RV200 was a die-shrink of the former R100 with some core logic tweaks for clockspeed, introduced in 2002. The only release in this generation was the Radeon 7500, which introduced little in the way of new features but offered substantial performance improvements over its predecessors.

ATI's second generation Radeon included a sophisticated pixel shader architecture. This chipset implemented Microsoft's pixel shader 1.4 specification for the first time.

Its performance relative to competitors was widely perceived as weak, and subsequent revisions of this generation were cancelled in order to focus on development of the next generation.

The R300 was the first GPU to fully support Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 technology upon its release in 2001. It incorporated fully programmable pixel and vertex shaders.

About a year later, the architecture was revised to allow for higher frequencies, more efficient memory access, and several other improvements in the R350 family. A budget line of RV350 products was based on this refreshed design with some elements disabled or removed.

Models using the new PCI Express interface were introduced in 2004. Using 110-nm and 130-nm manufacturing technologies under the X300 and X600 names, respectively, the RV370 and RV380 graphics processors were used extensively by consumer PC manufacturers.

While heavily based upon the previous generation, this line included extensions to the Shader Model 2 feature-set. Shader Model 2b, the specification ATI and Microsoft defined with this generation, offered somewhat more shader program flexibility.

ATI's DirectX 9.0c series of graphics cards, with complete shader Model 3.0 support. Launched in October 2005, this series brought a number of enhancements including the floating point render target technology necessary for HDR rendering with anti-aliasing.

ATI's first series of GPUs to replace the old fixed-pipeline and implement unified shader model. Subsequent revisions tuned the design for higher performance and energy efficiency, resulting in the ATI Mobility Radeon HD series for mobile computers.

Based on the R600 architecture. Mostly a bolstered with many more stream processors, with improvements to power consumption and GDDR5 support for the high-end RV770 and RV740(HD4770) chips. It arrived in late June 2008. The HD 4850 and HD 4870 have 800 stream processors and GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory, respectively. The 4890 was a refresh of 4870 with the same amount of stream processors yet higher clock rates due to refinements. The 4870x2 has 1600 stream processors and GDDR5 memory on an effective 512-bit memory bus with 230.4 Gbit/s video memory bandwidth available.

The series was launched on 23 September 2009. It featured a 40 nm fabrication process for the entire product line (only the HD4770 (RV740) was built on this process previously), with more stream cores and compatibility with the next major version of the DirectX API, DirectX 11, which launched on 22 October 2009 along with Microsoft Windows 7. The Rxxx/RVxxx codename scheme was scrapped entirely. The initial launch consisted of only the 5870 and 5850 models. ATI released beta drivers that introduced full OpenGL 4.0 support on all variants of this series in March 2010.[6]

Radeon logo from 2011 to 2013

This is the first series to be marketed solely under the "AMD" brand. It features a 3rd generation 40 nm design, rebalancing the existing architecture with redesigned shaders to give it better performance. It was released first on 22 October 2010, in the form of the 6850 and 6870. 3D output is enabled with HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.

"Southern Islands" was the first series to feature the new compute microarchitecture known as "Graphics Core Next"(GCN). GCN was used among the higher end cards, while the VLIW5 architecture utilized in the previous generation was used in the lower end, OEM products. However, the Radeon HD 7790 uses GCN 2, and was the first product in the series to be released by AMD on 9 January 2012.

The "Sea Islands" were OEM rebadges of the 7000 series, with only three products, code named Oland, available for general retail. The series, just like the "Southern Islands", used a mixture of VLIW5 models and GCN models for its desktop products.

"Volcanic Islands" GPUs were introduced with the AMD Radeon Rx 200 Series, and were first released in late 2013.[8] The Radeon Rx 200 line is mainly based on AMD's GCN architecture, with the lower end, OEM cards still using VLIW5. The majority of desktop products use GCN 1, while the R9 290x/290 & R7 260X/260 use GCN 2, and with only the R9 285 using the new GCN 3.[9]

GPUs codenamed "Caribbean Islands"[10] were introduced with the AMD Radeon Rx 300 Series, released in 2015. This series was the first to solely use GCN based models, ranging from GCN 1st to GCN 3rd Gen, including the GCN 3-based Fiji-architecture models named Fury X, Fury, Nano and the Radeon Pro Duo.

GPUs codenamed "Arctic Islands" were first introduced with the Radeon RX 400 Series in June 2016 with the announcement of the RX 480.[11] These cards were the first to use the new Polaris chips which implements GCN 4th Gen on the 14 nm fab process. The RX 500 Series released in April 2017 also uses Polaris chips.[12]

On 27 May 2019, at COMPUTEX 2019, AMD announced the new 'RDNA' graphics micro-architecture,[13] which is to succeed the Graphics Core Next micro-architecture. This is the basis for the Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards, the first to be built under the codename 'Navi'. These cards feature GDDR6 SGRAM and support for PCI Express 4.0.

On 5 March 2020, AMD publicly announced its plan to release a "refresh" of the RDNA micro-architecture.[14] Dubbed as the RDNA 2 architecture, it was stated to succeed the first-gen RDNA micro-architecture and was initially scheduled for a release in Q4 2020. RDNA 2 was confirmed as the graphics microarchitecture featured in the Xbox Series X and Series S consoles[15] from Microsoft, and PlayStation 5[16] from Sony, with proprietary tweaks and different GPU configurations in each systems' implementation.

AMD unveiled the Radeon RX 6000 series, its next-gen RDNA 2 graphics cards at an online event on 28 October 2020.[17][18] The lineup consists of the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT.[19][20] The RX 6800 and 6800 XT launched on 18 November 2020, with the RX 6900 XT being released on 8 December 2020.[21] Further variants including a Radeon RX 6700 (XT) series based on Navi 22, launched on 18 March 2021, a Radeon RX 6600(XT) series based on Navi 23, launched on 11 August 2021 (that is the 6600XT release date, the RX 6600 launched on 13 October 2021), and a Radeon RX 6500(XT), launched on 19 January 2022.[22][23][24][25][26]

Some generations vary from their predecessors predominantly due to architectural improvements, while others were adapted primarily to new manufacturing processes with fewer functional changes. The table below summarizes the APIs supported in each Radeon generation. Also see AMD FireStream and AMD FirePro branded products. The following table shows the graphics and compute APIs support across AMD GPU micro-architectures. Note that a branding series might include older generation chips.

Chip series	Micro­architecture	Fab	Supported APIs					AMD support	Year introduced	Introduced with
			Rendering			Computing / ROCm
			Vulkan[27]	OpenGL[28]	Direct3D	HSA	OpenCL
Wonder	Fixed-pipeline[lower-alpha 1]	1000 nm 800 nm	—	—	—	—	—	Ended	1986
Mach		800 nm 600 nm							1991
3D Rage		500 nm			5.0				1996	3D Rage
Rage Pro		350 nm		1.1	6.0				1997	Rage Pro
Rage 128		250 nm		1.2					1998	Rage 128 GL/VR
R100		180 nm 150 nm		1.3	7.0				2000	Radeon
R200	Programmable pixel & vertex pipelines	150 nm			8.1				2001	Radeon 8500
R300		150 nm 130 nm 110 nm		2.0[lower-alpha 2]	9.0 11 (FL 9_2)				2002	Radeon 9700
R420		130 nm 110 nm			9.0b 11 (FL 9_2)				2004	Radeon X800
R520		90 nm 80 nm			9.0c 11 (FL 9_3)				2005	Radeon X1800
R600	TeraScale 1	80 nm 65 nm		3.3	10.0 11 (FL 10_0)		ATI Stream		2007	Radeon HD 2900 XT
RV670		55 nm			10.1 11 (FL 10_1)		ATI Stream APP[29]			Radeon HD 3850/3870
RV770		55 nm 40 nm					1.0		2008	Radeon HD 4850/4870
Evergreen	TeraScale 2	40 nm		4.5 (Linux 4.2) [30][31][32][lower-alpha 3]	11 (FL 11_0)		1.2		2009	Radeon HD 5850/5870
Northern Islands	TeraScale 2 TeraScale 3								2010	Radeon HD 6850/6870 Radeon HD 6950/6970
Southern Islands	GCN 1st gen	28 nm	1.0	4.6	11 (FL 11_1) 12 (FL11_1)		1.2 2.0 possible		2012	Radeon HD 7950/7970
Sea Islands	GCN 2nd gen		1.2		11 (FL 12_0) 12 (FL 12_0)		2.0 (1.2 in MacOS, Linux) 2.1 Beta in Linux ROCm 2.2 possible		2013	Radeon HD 7790
Volcanic Islands	GCN 3rd gen								2014	Radeon R9 285
Polaris	GCN 4th gen	14 nm	1.2 1.3 (GCN 4)					Current	2016	Radeon RX 480
Vega	GCN 5th gen	14 nm 7 nm	1.3		11 (FL 12_1) 12 (FL 12_1)				2017	Radeon Vega Frontier Edition
Navi	RDNA	7 nm							2019	Radeon RX 5700 (XT)
Navi 2X	RDNA 2	7 nm 6 nm			11 (FL 12_1) 12 (FL 12_2)				2020	Radeon RX 6800 (XT)
Navi 3X	RDNA 3	6 nm 5 nm				?	?		2022	Radeon RX 7900 XT(X)

[33][34][35]

The following table shows features of AMD/ATI's GPUs (see also: List of AMD graphics processing units).

Name of GPU series	Wonder	Mach	3D Rage	Rage Pro	Rage 128	R100	R200	R300	R400	R500	R600	RV670	R700	Evergreen	Northern Islands	Southern Islands	Sea Islands	Volcanic Islands	Arctic Islands/Polaris	Vega	Navi 1x	Navi 2x	Navi 3x
Released	1986	1991	Apr 1996	Mar 1997	Aug 1998	Apr 2000	Aug 2001	Sep 2002	May 2004	Oct 2005	May 2007	Nov 2007	Jun 2008	Sep 2009	Oct 2010	Jan 2012	Sep 2013	Jun 2015	Jun 2016, Apr 2017, Aug 2019	Jun 2017, Feb 2019	Jul 2019	Nov 2020	Dec 2022
Marketing Name	Wonder	Mach	3D Rage	Rage Pro	Rage 128	Radeon 7000	Radeon 8000	Radeon 9000	Radeon X700/X800	Radeon X1000	Radeon HD 2000	Radeon HD 3000	Radeon HD 4000	Radeon HD 5000	Radeon HD 6000	Radeon HD 7000	Radeon 200	Radeon 300	Radeon 400/500/600	Radeon RX Vega, Radeon VII	Radeon RX 5000	Radeon RX 6000	Radeon RX 7000
AMD support
Kind	2D		3D
Instruction set architecture	Not publicly known										TeraScale instruction set					GCN instruction set					RDNA instruction set
Microarchitecture											TeraScale 1 (VLIW)			TeraScale 2 (VLIW5)	TeraScale 2 (VLIW5) up to 68xx TeraScale 3 (VLIW4) in 69xx [36][37]	GCN 1st gen	GCN 2nd gen	GCN 3rd gen	GCN 4th gen	GCN 5th gen	RDNA	RDNA 2	RDNA 3
Type	Fixed pipeline[lower-alpha 1]						Programmable pixel & vertex pipelines				Unified shader model
Direct3D	—		5.0	6.0		7.0	8.1	9.0 11 (9_2)	9.0b 11 (9_2)	9.0c 11 (9_3)	10.0 11 (10_0)	10.1 11 (10_1)		11 (11_0)		11 (11_1) 12 (11_1)	11 (12_0) 12 (12_0)			11 (12_1) 12 (12_1)		11 (12_1) 12 (12_2)
Shader model	—						1.4	2.0+	2.0b	3.0	4.0	4.1		5.0		5.1	5.1 6.5			6.7
OpenGL	—			1.1	1.2	1.3		2.1[lower-alpha 2][38]			3.3			4.5 (on Linux: 4.5 (Mesa 3D 21.0))[39][40][41][lower-alpha 3]		4.6 (on Linux: 4.6 (Mesa 3D 20.0))
Vulkan	—															1.0 (Win 7+ or Mesa 17+)	1.2 (Adrenalin 20.1.2, Linux Mesa 3D 20.0) 1.3 (GCN 4 and above (with Adrenalin 22.1.2, Mesa 22.0))						1.3
OpenCL	—										Close to Metal		1.1 (no Mesa 3D support)	1.2+ (on Linux: 1.1+ (no Image support on clover, with by rustiCL) with Mesa 3D, 1.2+ on GCN 1.Gen)			2.0+ (Adrenalin driver on Win7+) (on Linux ROCM, Linux Mesa 3D 1.2+ (no Image support in clover, but in rustiCL with Mesa 3D, 2.0+ and 3.0 with AMD drivers or AMD ROCm), 5th gen: 2.2 win 10+ and Linux RocM 5.0+				2.2+ and 3.0 windows 8.1+ and Linux ROCM 5.0+ (Mesa 3D rustiCL 1.2+ and 3.0 (2.1+ and 2.2+ wip)) [42] [43][44]
HSA / ROCm	—																				?
Video decoding ASIC	—										Avivo/UVD	UVD+	UVD 2	UVD 2.2	UVD 3	UVD 4	UVD 4.2	UVD 5.0 or 6.0	UVD 6.3	UVD 7 [45][lower-alpha 4]	VCN 2.0 [45][lower-alpha 4]	VCN 3.0 [46]	VCN 4.0
Video encoding ASIC	—															VCE 1.0	VCE 2.0	VCE 3.0 or 3.1	VCE 3.4	VCE 4.0 [45][lower-alpha 4]
Fluid Motion [lower-alpha 5]																							?
Power saving	?										PowerPlay				PowerTune	PowerTune & ZeroCore Power					?
TrueAudio	—																Via dedicated DSP		Via shaders
FreeSync	—																1 2
HDCP[lower-alpha 6]	?																1.4		2.2		2.3 [47]
PlayReady[lower-alpha 6]	—																		3.0		3.0
Supported displays[lower-alpha 7]						1–2	2							2–6							?
Max. resolution	?													2–6 × 2560×1600		2–6 × 4096×2160 @ 30 Hz			2–6 × 5120×2880 @ 60 Hz	3 × 7680×4320 @ 60 Hz [48]	7680×4320 @ 60 Hz PowerColor		7680x4320 @165 HZ
/drm/radeon[lower-alpha 8]																		—
/drm/amdgpu[lower-alpha 8]	—															Experimental [49]

On 24 November 2015, AMD released a new version of their graphics driver following the formation of the Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) to provide extensive software support for their graphics cards. This driver, labelled Radeon Software Crimson Edition, overhauls the UI with Qt, resulting in better responsiveness from a design and system perspective. It includes a new interface featuring a game manager, clocking tools, and sections for different technologies.[50]

Unofficial modifications such as Omega drivers and DNA drivers were available. These drivers typically consist of mixtures of various driver file versions with some registry variables altered and are advertised as offering superior performance or image quality. They are, of course, unsupported, and as such, are not guaranteed to function correctly. Some of them also provide modified system files for hardware enthusiasts to run specific graphics cards outside of their specifications.

AMD Catalyst was based on a proprietary binary blob.

The unified kernel-mode driver (DRM/KMS) is utilized by Catalyst and by Mesa 3D.[51] amdkfd was mainlined into Linux kernel 3.19.[52]

Radeon Software is being developed for Microsoft Windows and Linux. As of January 2019, other operating systems are not officially supported. This may be different for the AMD FirePro brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers.

ATI previously offered driver updates for their retail and integrated Macintosh video cards and chipsets. ATI stopped support for Mac OS 9 after the Radeon R200 cards, making the last officially supported card the Radeon 9250. The Radeon R100 cards up to the Radeon 7200 can still be used with even older classic Mac OS versions such as System 7, although not all features are taken advantage of by the older operating system.[53]

Ever since ATI's acquisition by AMD, ATI no longer supplies or supports drivers for classic Mac OS nor macOS. macOS drivers can be downloaded from Apple's support website, while classic Mac OS drivers can be obtained from 3rd party websites that host the older drivers for users to download. ATI used to provide a preference panel for use in macOS called ATI Displays which can be used both with retail and OEM versions of its cards. Though it gives more control over advanced features of the graphics chipset, ATI Displays has limited functionality compared to Catalyst for Windows or Linux.

[54]

The free and open-source for Direct Rendering Infrastructure has been under constant development by the Linux kernel developers, by 3rd party programming enthusiasts and by AMD employees. It is composed out of five parts:

1. Linux kernel component DRM
   • this part received dynamic re-clocking support in Linux kernel version 3.12 and its performance has become comparable to that of AMD Catalyst
2. Linux kernel component KMS driver: basically the device driver for the display controller
3. user-space component libDRM
4. user-space component in Mesa 3D; currently most of these components are written conforming to the Gallium3D-specifications.
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with Version 10.x (last 10.6.7) are as of September 2014 limited to OpenGL version 3.3 and OpenGL ES 3.0.
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with Version 11.x (last 11.2.2) are as of Mai 2016 limited to OpenGL version 4.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0 or 3.1 (11.2+).
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with version 12.x (in June 2016) can support OpenGL version 4.3.[55]
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with Version 13.0.x ( in November 2016) can support OpenGL 4.4 and unofficial 4.5.
   • all drivers in Mesa 3D with Version 17.0.x ( in January 2017) can support OpenGL 4.5 and OpenGL ES 3.2
   • Actual Hardware Support for different MESA versions see: glxinfo [56]
   • AMD R600/700 since Mesa 10.1: OpenGL 3.3+, OpenGL ES 3.0+ (+: some more Features of higher Levels and Mesa Version)
   • AMD R800/900 (Evergreen, Northern Islands): OpenGL 4.1+ (Mesa 13.0+), OpenGL ES 3.0+ (Mesa 10.3+)
   • AMD GCN (Southern/Sea Islands and newer): OpenGL 4.5+ (Mesa 17.0+), OpenGL ES 3.2+ (Mesa 18.0+), Vulkan 1.0 (Mesa 17.0+), Vulkan 1.1 (GCN 2nd Gen+, Mesa 18.1+)
5. a special and distinct 2D graphics device driver for X.Org Server, which is finally about to be replaced by Glamor
6. OpenCL with GalliumCompute (previous Clover) is not full developed in 1.0, 1.1 and only parts of 1.2. Some OpenCL conformance tests were failed in 1.0 and 1.1, most in 1.2. ROCm is developed by AMD and Open Source. OpenCL 1.2 is full supported with OpenCL 2.0 language. Only CPU or GCN-Hardware with PCIe 3.0 is supported. So GCN 3rd Gen. or higher is here full usable for OpenCL 1.2 software.

The free and open-source driver supports many of the features available in Radeon-branded cards and APUs, such as multi-monitor or hybrid graphics.

The free and open-source drivers are primarily developed on Linux and for Linux.

Being entirely free and open-source software, the free and open-source drivers can be ported to any existing operating system. Whether they have been, and to what extent depends entirely on the man-power available. Available support shall be referenced here.

FreeBSD adopted DRI, and since Mesa 3D is not programmed for Linux, it should have identical support.

MorphOS supports 2D and 3D acceleration for Radeon R100, R200 and R300 chipsets.[57]

AmigaOS 4 supports Radeon R100, R200, R300,[58] R520 (X1000 Series), R700 (HD 4000 Series), HD 5000 (Evergreen) series, HD 6000 (Northern Islands) series and HD 7000 (Southern Islands) series.[59] The RadeonHD AmigaOS 4 driver has been developed by Hans de Ruiter[60] funded and owned by A-EON Technology Ltd. The older R100 and R200 "ATIRadeon" driver for AmigaOS, originally developed Forefront Technologies has been acquired by A-EON Technology Ltd in 2015.

In the past ATI provided hardware and technical documentation to the Haiku Project to produce drivers with full 2D and video in/out support on older Radeon chipsets (up to R500) for Haiku. A new Radeon HD driver was developed with the unofficial and indirect guidance of AMD open source engineers and currently exists in recent Haiku versions. The new Radeon HD driver supports native mode setting on R600 through Southern Islands GPU's.[61]

Dataram Corporation is manufacturing RAM for AMD.

Version 4.1 was released in 2013-05-08.[83]

In 2014-04-02, Dataram Corporation announced it has signed an Agreement with Elysium Europe Ltd. to expand sales penetration in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Under this Agreement, Elysium is authorized to sell AMD Radeon RAMDisk software. Elysium is focusing on etailers, retailers, system builders and distributors.[91]