SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200 REVIEW

Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second. High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine. Advanced vertex shader support for the latest programmable effects.

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware. 1.4 Pixel Shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass. 1.1 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions. Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles. Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL via extensions.

Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D™ and OpenGL ® applications. Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes. Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact.

Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth by up to 25%

Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams. Delivers industry leading DVD playback. Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage. Unique adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques. YUV to RGB color space conversion. Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback. 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering. Upscaling and downscaling. Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide. Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems. Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics.

Supports the new AGP 8X standard (2.0 GB/sec). VIVO ( Video In & Video Out ). 128-bit floating-point color precision allows for a greater range of colors and brightness.