Xbox 360 – Specifications on ATi´s graphic circuit

Xbox 360 relies on a graphic circuit from ATi and we’ve already seen during Microsoft’s officila presentation some of its specifications of the circuit for Xbox 360. We haven’t heard much from från ATi though, I.e. until now when it through media announces detailed specifications on the circuit used in Xbox 360. Several articles have been published already that walk the reader through the information ATI has supplied and among others we get to know more about the 48 shaders units and the circuits ability to use 4x antialiasing with a performance hit. At the same time ATi announces that the circuit has been specially made for Xbox 360.

 

Xbox 360 is a gaming console and at ATi they haven’t only been working on reaching optimum performance but also to reach the optimum at the lowest possible power consumption. All to fit it into a relatively slimmed and quiet console. ATi says that its “unified shader” technology with 48 parallell shaders, that can both work with pixels and vertices, wogether with its interated eDRAM are the two most interesting things about the graphic circuit in Xbox 360.

The 48 pipelines work dynamically dependig on what the current application demands. If its much better to work with pixels that is exactly what it will do and the same applies to verices. This will result in an as efficient resource handling as possiblewhich will be able to supply power to the most demanding situations in 3D-applications. The integrated eDRAM chip at 10MB is an important part of ATI’s grpahic circuit and is especially efficient in a gaming console when they use specified resolution during the game development. These 10MB eDRAM can with the help of 192 smaller logic circuits handle all the antialiasing. This makes it possible for Xbox 360 to offer 4x antialiasing at 720p resolution without any loss of performance. The main circuit never needs to use the system/graphic memory to store this information.

There is quite a lot of information available on ATi’s circuit but there are still a few questions that remains unanswered.

Articles on Xbox 360’s graphic circuit from ATi:
:: HardOCP :: TechReport :: Firingsquad ::