- DirectX 9.0c
- OpenGL 1.5
- 3Dc
- Pixel Shader 2.0b
- Vertex Shader 2.0
- Smoothvision HD
- .13um low-k
- PCI Express Native support
ATI's X800XT supports the latest versions of DirectX and OpenGL. I've covered most of these features in my Asus X800XT review. To summarize, Pixel shaders with up to 1536 instructions in a single pass, Vertex Shaders with up to 65080 instructions in a pass through loops and branches, 6x FSAA , Temporal AA, 16x Anisotropic Filtering and 3Dc, normal map compression.
The X800XT uses TSMC's .13um low-k process. Most of today's high-end video cards are using the .13 micron process. The X800XT and variants, the Geforce 6800 and variants mostly use .13 micron, with a few using .11 micron process which is a refinement of the .13 process. Low-k dielectric lowers the power requirements of the silicon and improves performance of the chip over standard silicon designs that don't use low-k.
ATI decided early on that all of their cards for the PCI Express launch would be PCI Express Native. PCI Express is the new standard that replaces the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) that has been in widespread use since 1997. The PCI Express X16 slot found on the Intel 915/925 boards and some of the newer AMD motherboards (nForce4, ATI Xpress 200, VIA K8T890) support this standard. PCI Express offers up to 8 GB of bandwidth (250 MHz per lanex2 for bidirectional bandwidth) per second which is up to 4x that of AGP 8x the last standard. Other PCI Express manufacturers including XGI and NVIDIA use a bridge chip to translate the signal over the PCI Express bus.
