ATI Technologies RADEON X1550 SERIES User manual

Radeon® X1550
Series
User’s Guide
P/N 137-71102-10

ii
Copyright © 2006, ATI Technologies Inc. All rights reserved.
ATI, the ATI logo, and ATI product and product-feature names are trademarks and/or registered
trademarks of ATI Technologies Inc. All other company and/or product names are trademarks and/or
registered trademarks of their respective owners. Features, performance and specifications are subject
to change without notice. Product may not be exactly as shown in diagrams.
Reproduction of this manual, or parts thereof, in any form, without the express written permission of
ATI Technologies Inc. is strictly prohibited.
Disclaimer
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this document, ATI Technologies Inc.
assumes no liability with respect to the operation or use of ATI hardware, software or other products
and documentation described herein, for any act or omission of ATI concerning such products or this
documentation, for any interruption of service, loss or interruption of business, loss of anticipatory
profits, or for punitive, incidental or consequential damages in connection with the furnishing,
performance, or use of the ATI hardware, software, or other products and documentation provided
herein.
ATI Technologies Inc. reserves the right to make changes without further notice to a product or system
described herein to improve reliability, function or design. With respect to ATI products which this
document relates, ATI disclaims all express or implied warranties regarding such products, including
but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-
infringement.
Macrovision
Apparatus Claims of U.S. Patent Nos. 4,631,603; 4,819,098; 4,907,093; and 6,516,132 licensed for
limited viewing uses only.
This product incorporates copyright protection technology that is protected by US patents and other
intellectual property rights. Use of this copyright protection technology must be authorized by
Macrovision, and is intended for home and other limited viewing uses only unless otherwise authorized
by Macrovision. Reverse engineering or disassembly is prohibited.

iii
Note: This graphics card is for use only with compatible UL Listed
personal computers that have Installation Instructions detailing user
installation of card cage accessories.
LIMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS
•Read Instructions - All the safety and operating instructions should
be read before the product is operated.
•Retain Instructions - The safety and operating instructions should be
retained for future reference.
•Heed Warnings - All warnings on the product and the operating
instructions should be adhered to.
•Compatibility - This option card is for use only with IBM AT or
compatible UL Listed personal computers that have Installation
Instructions detailing user installation of card cage accessories.
•Grounding - For continued protection against risk of electric shock
and fire, this accessory should be installed only in products equipped
with a three-wire grounding plug, a plug having a third (grounding) pin.
This plug will only fit into a grounding-type power outlet. This is a
safety feature. If you are unable to insert the plug into the outlet,
contact your electrician to replace the obsolete outlet. Do not defeat
the safety purpose of the grounding-type plug.
•Secure Attachment - All card securement pins shall be completely
tightened as to provide continuous bonding between the option card
and the PC chassis.
•Lightning - For added protection for this product during a lightning
storm, or when it is left unattended and unused for long periods of
time, unplug it from the wall outlet, and disconnect the antenna or
cable system. This will prevent damage to the product due to lightning
and power-line surges.
•Power Lines - An outside antenna system should not be located in
the vicinity of overhead power lines or other light or power circuits, or
where it can fall into such power lines or circuits.
•Antenna Installation - When installing an outside antenna system,
extreme care should be taken to keep from touching such power lines
or circuits, as contact with them may be fatal.

iv

v
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Radeon® X1550 Series Features 1
System Requirements 4
Before You Begin 4
Installing Hardware . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Graphics Card Bus Types 7
Basic Graphics Card Installation 7
Advanced Installation: AGP 9
Advanced Installation: PCIe™ 11
Connecting Devices 14
Using Multiple Displays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Display Configurations 17

vi
Installing Software and Drivers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Installing Drivers and Software in Windows® 21
Monitor Configuration 22
To set up a multi-monitor display 23
Reinstalling Drivers 23
Installing the Catalyst™ Software Suite 24
Catalyst™ Control Center 27
Launching Catalyst™ Control Center 27
Catalyst™ Control Center Dashboard 30
Catalyst™ Control Center Views 31
Hotkeys Manager 32
Profiles Manager 33
Preferences 35
Help 38
Information Center 39
Displays Manager 40
Displays Manager Advanced View 41
Display Options 46
Monitor Properties 49
Avivo™ Color 54
HDTV Support 55
3D 58
Standard Settings 59
Anti-aliasing 61
Set the Anti-Aliasing preference manually 61
Adaptive Anti-aliasing 63
Anisotropic Filtering 63
Catalyst™ A.I. 65
Mipmap Detail Level 67
Adjust the Mipmap detail level 67
All Settings 68
API Specific 71
Color 73
Color Desktop 74
Color - FullScreen 3D 77
Avivo™ Video for Radeon® X1000 Series 78
Standard Settings 79
VPU Recover 88
Using TV Display and Capture Features . . . . . . . 93
Using TV Out 93
Connecting to HDTV 95

vii
CrossFire™ FAQ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Troubleshooting 103
Product Registration 105
Customer Care 105
Additional Accessories 107
Compliance Information 107
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131

viii

Radeon® X1550 Series Features 1
CHAPTER 1:
Introduction
Congratulations on the purchase of your ATI Radeon® X1550 Series
graphics card. We hope that you will enjoy countless hours of trouble-free
computing.
Radeon® X1550 Series Features
Graphic Features
• Native PCI Express® X16 bus support.
• Four parallel rendering pipelines.
• 32/MB/64MB/128MB/256MB/512MB GDDR3 on-board
memory.
• Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® Shader Model 3.x.
• High performance Ultra-Threaded shader engine.
• Two vertex shader processors.
• Four pixel shader processors.
• 128-bit 4-channel memory interface supporting DDR/DDR2/
GDDR3 memory devices.
• Native PCI Express® x16 bus interface.
SmoothVision™
• Full-scene anti-aliasing method that smooths uneven edges and
improves blurred images.
• 2x/4x/6x Anti-aliasing modes with a loss-less compression up to a
ratio of 6:1 at all resolutions.
• 2x/4x//8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes with up to 128-tap
texture filtering.
HyperZ™
• Ensures optimal hardware performance by discarding irrelevant
object data that is not visible to the user.
• Conserves video memory bandwidth.

2 Radeon® X1550 Series Features
• Loss-less Z-buffer compression
• Z Cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering.
VideoShader™
• Seamlessly integrates pixel shaders with video in real time.
• All format DTV/HDTV decoding.
• Adaptive Per-Pixel- De-interlacing and Frame Rate Conversion.
512-bit Ring Bus Memory Controller
• Programmable intelligent arbitration logic.
• New fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs.
• Hierarchal Z-buffer with Early Z test.
• Lossless Z Compression (up to 48.1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear.
• Z Cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering.
• Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including
widescreen HDTV resolutions.
Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine
• Support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 Shader Model 3.0
programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware.
• Full speed 128-bit floating point processing.
• Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads.
• Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic
branching and flow control.
• Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency.
• High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k).
• Up to 1,536 instructions per rendering pass.
• 3Dc+ texture compression
• High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and luminance
maps.
• Works with any single-channel or two-channel data format.
• Multiple Render Target (MRT) support.
• Render-to-vertex buffer support.
• Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0.