AMD Radeon HD 7970 announced

[zarx]

Advanced Image Quality

Much has been said about AMD’s claims of leading edge texture filtering quality on the HD 6000-series but for the most part, it was an improvement over previous generations. Whether it was up to expectations is still open for debate but the Southern Islands family is once again claiming to have virtually eliminated the flickering and artifacts that sometimes appear in games. 

In order to high the high note in terms of texture filtering, Southern Islands cards feature an improved anisotropic filtering algorithm that’s designed to virtually eliminate shimmering in high resolution textures. This may sound like a tall order to fulfill but after seeing it in action, we’re confident AMD can deliver this time around. 

One of the beauties of this new filtering algorithm is its ability to run without additional buffering so there is no drain on system resources. In addition, it is automatically enabled to gamers should see vastly improved image quality without having to dive into the Catalyst Control Panel. 

Introducing PRT (Partially Resident Textures)

One of the main challenges for today’s GPUs is how to handle large amounts of high resolution textures when moving through a scene. Presently, when a player moves through a game environment the texture information in upcoming frames is constantly loaded between the disk, CPU and the graphics card. Usually the effect of this preloading is seamless but as larger amounts of information are loaded, stuttering can occur. 

AMD’s solution to this somewhat complex problem is to leverage the local memory on the GPU and allow it to act as a true texture caching system. Essentially, upcoming textures are prefetched from the CPU and disk and stored locally on the GPU until they are ready to be used by the application. In a way this can almost be considered a form of texture “streaming” and should help eliminate the stutter normally associated with scene loading. 

In addition to preloading, PRT can also dynamically load selected textures based on when they will be needed instead of loading every bandwidth-hogging texture all the time. This should help eliminate the memory footprint the feature requires. 

Unfortunately for gamers Partially Resident Textures technology is application controlled so it has to be built into a game engine before it can be utilized. Supposedly, AMD’s development team is working with game developers to include this feature in upcoming releases but there aren’t any titles on the horizon that will put it to good use.

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