ATI launches Radeon HD 6500M, 6300M

November 29, 2010 | 10:59

Tags: #gpu #hd3d #mobile-gpu #radeon-mobility

Companies: #amd #ati

ATI has beefed up its mobile GPU offerings, quietly launching a pair of new Radeon HD 6000-series models: the Radeon HD 6500M and Radeon HD 6300M.

Designed for the premium and mid-range markets respectively, both units are fully DirectX 11 compatible, with Shader Model 5.0, DirectCompute 11, and HDR texture compression support as standard along with a programmable hardware tessellation unit. OpenGL 4.1 and OpenCL 1.1 support is also included.

The Radeon HD 6500M is the premium offering, aimed at gaming laptops and other high-performance systems. Featuring 400 stream processors, 20 texture units, 32 Z/stencil ROP units and eight colour ROP units, the engine is clocked at 500MHz to 650MHz while the GDDR5 or DDR3 memory is clocked at 900MHz. Overall, ATI claims up to 520 gigaFLOPS of compute performance in single-precision mode, or around 650 million polygons per second.

The Radeon HD 6300M lowers the specifications in order to keep the price down, losing support for GDDR5 and dropping to 320 stream processors, eight texture units, 16 Z/stencil ROP units and four colour ROP units. The engine is clocked at 500MHz to 750MHz, the memory clock at 800MHz to 900MHz, and the overall performance rated at a less impressive 120 gigaFLOPS or around 187.5 million polygons per second.

Both models include support for ATI's dynamic switchable graphics technology for alternating between low-power integrated graphics and high-performance dedicated graphics. They also support hardware acceleration for video playback, HD3D support for stereoscopic gaming and Blu-ray 3D playback, an integrated 7.1 channel HD audio controller and Eyefinity support for up to four displays on the 6300M or six displays on the 6500M.

While both GPUs support adaptive anti-aliasing, morphological anti-aliasing, 16x angle-independent anisotropic filtering, and 128-bit floating-point HDR rendering, the lower-cost 6300M only manages 12x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing compared to the 6500M's 24x.

ATI has also confirmed that the Radeon HD 6500M will include CrossFireX support for chaining up to two GPUs in a single system, although expect a serious hit to battery life if OEMs choose to implement the feature.

Pricing for the GPUs has yet to be confirmed, but with both models live in ATI's product listings now, expect to see laptops based around the GPUs in the coming months.

Are you impressed with ATI's mobile Radeon HD 6000-series offerings, or has the company missed something important with these models? Share your thoughts over in the forums.
Discuss this in the forums
YouTube logo
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review

October 14 2021 | 15:04

TOP STORIES

SUGGESTED FOR YOU