NVIDIA's recent introduction of NV43, and a flagship product based around it, has shaken up the mid-range performance graphics sector. Out-classing and out-pacing the previous performance champions - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra - the GeForce 6600 GT has set the initial pace for new mid-range hardware. Today is ATI's attempt to overtake, introducing a new ASIC and new board design in their push to do so.

Like NV43 compared to NV40, ATI's new ASIC for the mid-range space, RV410, shares the same basic 3D feature set as the parent architecture, R420. That means support for the ps_2_b pixel shader HLSL profile in DirectX 9.0, full support for 3Dc, swappable sample grids for up to 6X anti-aliasing, 16X anistropic filtering, temporal anti-aliasing, the same functional units in the fragment pipeline, six vertex shader units, along with everything else.



Link: Hexus