ATI Technologies X1800 - 100-435705 Radeon XT 512MB GDDR3 SDRAM PCI Express x16 Graphics... User manual

Radeon® X1800
Series
User’s Guide
P/N 137-40889-20

ii
Copyright © 2005, 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, 4,577,216, 4,819,098, and 4,907,093 licensed for
limited viewing uses only.
This product incorporates copyright protection technology that is protected by method claims of certain
U.S. patents and other intellectual property rights owned by Macrovision Corporation and other rights
owners. Use of this copyright protection technology must be authorized by Macrovision Corporation,
and is intended for home and other limited viewing uses only unless otherwise authorized by
Macrovision Corporation. Reverse engineering or disassembly is prohibited.

iii
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

1
Table of Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Radeon® X1800 Series Features 1
Graphic Features 1
System Requirements 4
External Connectors 4
Before You Begin 4
Record Your Serial and Part Numbers 4
Uninstall Previous Graphics Card Drivers 5
Installing Your ATI Graphics Card . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Graphics Card Bus Types 7
Basic Graphics Card Installation 7
Advanced Installation: AGP 9
Advanced Installation: PCIe™ 11
Connecting Devices 13
Using Multiple Displays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Connecting Your Monitors 15
Display Configurations 17
Installing Software. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Installing Drivers and Software in Windows® 19
Software Installation Prerequisites 19
Monitor Configuration 20
Reinstalling Drivers 21
Installing the Catalyst™ Software Suite 22
Catalyst™ Control Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Launching Catalyst™ Control Center Using the Start Menu 25

2
Other Quick Launch Access Points 26
Catalyst™ Control Center Dashboard 28
Switch Views 29
Hotkeys Manager 29
Profiles Manager 31
Preferences 33
Help 35
Information Center 36
Displays Manager Advanced View 38
Display Options 43
Monitor Properties 46
Monitor Attributes 47
Digital Panel Properties 48
Attributes 49
Avivo™ Color 51
HDTV Support 52
3D 55
Standard Settings 56
Anti-aliasing 57
Set the Anti-Aliasing preference manually 58
Adaptive Anti-aliasing 59
Anisotropic Filtering 60
Catalyst™ A.I. 62
Mipmap Detail Level 63
All Settings 65
Set the Anti-Aliasing preference manually 66
API Specific 68
Color 70
Color Desktop 71
Color - FullScreen 3D 74
Avivo™ Video for Radeon® Series starting from 9500 75
Standard Settings 76
Adjustments 77
Video Overlay Theater Mode 79
Deinterlacing 80
All Settings 81
VPU Recover 85
CrossFire™ 87
Enable CrossFire™ 89
CrossFire™ graphics card connections 90
Graphics cards with different amounts of memory 91
Card Reversal Recommend 91
3D client is active 92
CrossFire™ Is Currently Unavailable 92

3
Disabling CrossFire™ 92
Using TV Display and Capture Features . . . . . . . 95
Using TV Out 95
Viewing Your PC’s Display on a TV 95
Connecting to a TV 95
Using a Monitor vs. Using TV Display 96
Viewing Text on a TV 97
Using a TV as the Only Display 97
Using Games and Applications 97
Connecting to HDTV 97
Using Your ATI HDTV Video Cable 99
CrossFire™ FAQ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Using the Radeon® X1800 Series with CrossFire™
107
CrossFire™ Overview 107
Allowable CrossFire™ System Components 107
CrossFire™ Rendering Modes 107
SuperTiling 108
Scissor Mode 109
Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) Mode 110
Super Anti-aliasing Mode 111
Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Troubleshooting 115
Product Registration 119
Customer Care 119
Limited Product Warranty and Guideline for Obtaining Warranty
Service 121
Product Warranty 121
Warranty Exclusions and Limitations 122
Disclaimer 122
Obtaining Warranty Service 123
Getting Additional Accessories 123
Compliance Information 123
FCC Compliance Information 123
Industry Canada Compliance Statement 124
Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment
(WEEE) Directive Compliance 124

4
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Radeon® X1800 Series Features 1
CHAPTER 1:
Introduction
Congratulations on the purchase of your ATI Radeon® X1800 Series
graphics card. We hope that you will enjoy countless hours of trouble-free
computing.
Radeon® X1800 Series Features
Graphic Features
• Native PCI Express® X16 bus support.
• Four parallel rendering pipelines.
• 256MB or 512 MB GDDR3 on-board memory.
• Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® Shader Model 3.x.
• High performance Ultra-Threaded shader engine.
• Eight vertex shader processors.
• Sixteen pixel shader processors.
• 512-bit internal ring-bus memory controller.
• 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3 memory interface.
• 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® X1800 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