AMD confirms Radeon HD 3800 name, leaks DirectX 10.1 info

With all the news about NVIDIA's great GeForce 8800 GT and reviews of Intel's 45nm QX9650 popping up everywhere AMD/ATI felt a bit sad so the company did an effort to grab some headlines today by "leaking" a PDF file with lots of information about their upcoming graphics card and DirectX 10.1.

This is one of the features AMD will be hammering on. The new GeForce 8800 GT doesn't have DX10.1 support so AMD will do its best to convince everyone that DX10.1 is really a must-have feature.

One of the first things the document confirms is that the new ATI graphics card series will be called Radeon HD 3800 series. The firm hasn't confirmed the name of the RV670 yet but we believe it will be Radeon HD 3850 and that the cards will be launched on November 15th. According to the memo the Radeon HD 3800 series will feature a power efficient 55nm design, with PCI Express 2.0, UVD and hardware accelerated tessellation support.

The document also outlines some of the key features of Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 10.1 update which will add new shading and texturing capabilities, anti-aliasing improvements and tighter specifications.

Here's an overview of the new DX10.1 features:

DirectX 10.1's new features
Feature	Function	Benefits
Shader and texture improvements
Cube Map Arrays	Allow reading and writing of multiple cube maps in a single rendering pass	Efficient global illumination in real time for complex, dynamic, interface scenes. Enable many ray trace quality effects including indirect lighting, color bleeding, soft shadows, refraction and high quality glossy reflections
Separate Blend Modes per-MRT	Allows pixel shaders to output to multiple buffers (MRTs) - each with their own blend mode	Efficient Deferred Rendering for improved performance in complex 3D scenes
Increased Vertex Shader Inputs & Outputs	Doubled from 16 to 32 128-bit values per share	Improved performance for complex shaders
Gather4	Allows a 2x2 block of unfiltered texture values to be fetched in place of a single bilinear filtered texture lookup	Improved performance for Stream Computing applications
LOD instruction	New shader instruction that returns the level of detail for a filtered texture lookup	Custom texture filtering techniques for optimized performance and quality
Improved Anti-Aliasing
Multi-sample buffer reads and writes	Allow individual color and depth samples in a multi-sample buffer to be accessed directly by a shader	Custome edge detect filters for high quality anti-aliasing with optimized performance. Improved adaptive anti-aliasing perfoprmance. Improved compatibility of anti-aliasing quality with HDR rendering. Improved anti-aliasing compatibility and performance with deferred rendering techniques.
Pixel Coverage Masks	Enables programmable AA in a pixel shader
Programmable AA Sample Patterns	Gives programmers control over individual sample locations for each pixel	Temporal anti-aliasing. Improved image quality for multi-GPU anti-aliasing techniques.
Tighter specifications
FP32 filtering required	Filtering of 128-bit floating point texture formats now a requirement instead of optional feature	Encourages use of these high precision data formats by ensuring HW compatibility.
Int16 blending requires	Blending of 64-bit integer pixel format now required instead of option feature
Minimum 4x MSAA support required	Multi-sample anti-aliasing with at least 4 samples per pixel must be supported for all 32-bit and 64-bit pixel formats	Ensures AA can behave identically on all DX 10.1 GPUs. Encourages support for AA by improving consistency
Standardized AA sample patterns	Pre-defined sample locations for 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16xx modes that hardware must support
Increased precision for floating point operations	0.5 ULP precision required for all floating point math (add/subtract/multiply/divide) and blending operations	Eliminates rounding errors. Matches IEEE standard requirements for these operations.