This week at Computex, the annual computer expo held in Taipei, Taiwan, all sorts of neat products are on display and some seeing the (public) light of day for the first time. Among those first-timers is the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800, a rebuttal to the recently announced Nvidia GeForce 9M series of laptop GPUs. The Mobility series of graphics chips is ATI’s line of laptop-specific hardware. This latest iteration, as claimed by ATI, is “tripling top-of-the line graphics performance in comparison to the previous generation ATI Mobility Radeon.”
So far the Mobility Radeon HD 3800 is the only chipset capable of supporting Microsoft DirectX 10.1 It also allows users to view high-def material, such as Blu-ray flicks, in full 1080p resolution. The newest chipset also supports ATI’s CrossFireX, allowing two or more graphics processors to work simultaneously.
The official ATI pitch:
• The Ultimate Visual Experience™ is enabled with next generation Unified Shader Architecture, immense processing power and a 256-bit GDDR3 memory interface. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series delivers feature-rich graphics for astonishing image quality and optimal 3D modeling application performance.
• ATI CrossFireX technology for mobile graphics delivers high-performance PC gaming by combining multiple ATI Radeon™ graphics in a single notebook PC to increase graphics quality and performance. ATI CrossFireX is designed to the latest industry-standards for notebooks today.
• PCI Express 2.0 offers more than enough horsepower for the most demanding professional graphics applications by boosting 3D graphics performance while providing fast throughput resulting in an excellent overall system performance.
• ATI Avivo™ HD Technology is the high-performance engine for advanced image and video technology, while freeing the CPU from compute-intensive video decoding tasks. ATI Avivo™ HD Technology delivers smooth full HD format video playback and photo editing with brilliant colors and sharp images, ideal for professionals demanding the next level of display technology excellence. 2
• Energy-efficient 55nm graphics processor technology helps extend battery life and conserve energy.
• ATI PowerPlay™ technology dynamically delivers the optimal balance between performance and power to suit performance requirements for long battery life and superior performance-per-watt operation.
• Breakthrough Performance-per-watt is critical to users who demand exceptional performance and power saving features that help lower power consumption.
• New design size implementation allows the chip to run cool, producing less heat so that notebook delivers the power, performance and efficiency users crave.
