Specifications

30 million transistors
0.18u fabrication
Up to 128MB DDR SDRAM
6.4 GB/s memory bandwidth
200MHz core/200MHz (effectively 400MHz) memory clock
HyperZ technology boosts effective bandwidth by over 20% (More on this later)
Dual Rendering pipelines at 200MHz
1.5 Gigatextels effective fill rate with HyperZ enabled
30M polygons/s Charisma Engine, with character animation features
Support for up to 8 lights (local or infinite)
350MHz DAC
ATI MAXX technology capable
Shipping summer 2000
Emboss, Dot Product 3, and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping
3D textures

The Radeon 256 marks the first time that ATI has actually published their megahertz numbers. Previously, we could extrapolate the memory and core speed by using known fill rate numbers, ATI has never officially advertised their megahertz numbers.

Of course, this was partly due to the fact that previous ATI chips were running at slower clock speeds than the competition, despite similar performance. Running at 200MHz, the Radeon 256 will actually be one of the fastest (in terms of megahertz) GPU's on the market this summer.

ATI's Radeon 256 can render 6 texels per pass, resulting in a 1.2 Gigatexel fillrate. As you can see, the specs read 1.5 effective gigatexels/second. We will examine this figure in more depth later in this article, but essentially, this number can be achieved thanks to ATI's HyperZ technology.

Charisma Engine

No matter how you may have felt about ATI in the past, you've got to love the name Charisma Engine, it sounds more like a translation of a poetic verse for which there is no English equal. Obviously, ATI wants to draw comparisons to Sony's Emotion Engine, which really surprised everyone outside of ATI and NVIDIA with its performance capabilities. ATI claims 30 million polygons per second with Radeon 256.

The chip that we saw at GDC did have a little heatsink on it, but it didn't run hot to the touch. In contrast to the NVIDIA Quadro or 3dfx Voodoo5, the ATI Radeon 256 does not require an AGP PRO slot or an external power connection. This will allow an easier upgrade experience for most users and should also mean less heat floating inside computer cases.

Probably the most exciting thing we've learned is that ATI's MAXX technology, of alternate frame rendering using multiple graphics processors, is fully compatible with their Radeon 256 product.

Although ATI did not comment on board based solutions, a Radeon 256 MAXX board with two chips running in parallel could give you 3 gigatexels of fill rate, and 60M polygons/sec. If this product ever came to market, we're sure you could do much more than guide a missile with this chip.