The line features 3D acceleration based upon Direct3D 7.0 and OpenGL 1.3, and all but the entry-level versions offloading host geometry calculations to a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine, a major improvement in features and performance compared to the preceding Rage design.

[3] Like the GeForce, the Radeon R100 featured a hardware transform and lighting (T&L) engine to perform geometry calculations, freeing up the host computer's CPU.

[4] Radeon also introduced a new memory bandwidth optimization and overdraw reduction technology called HyperZ.

Consisting of 3 different functions, it allows the Radeon to perform very competitively compared to competing designs with higher fillrates and bandwidth on paper.

The Radeon's Ark demo presents a science-fiction environment with heavy use of features such as multiple texture layers for image effects and detail.

R100-based GPUs have forward-looking programmable shading capability in their pipelines; however, the chips are not flexible enough to support the Microsoft Direct3D specification for Pixel Shader 1.1.

A forum post by an ATI engineer in 2001 clarified this: ...prior to the final release of DirectX 8.0, Microsoft decided that it was better to expose the RADEON's and GeForce{2}'s extended multitexture capabilities via the extensions to SetTextureStageState() instead of via the pixel shader interface.

Basically, we hardware manufacturers started using the word "shader" a lot once we were able to do per-pixel dot products (i.e. the RADEON / GF generation of chips).

With the final release of DirectX 8.0, the term "shader" has become more crystallized in that it is actually used in the interface that developers use to write their programs rather than just general "industry lingo."

Because of what I stated earlier, RADEON doesn't support either of the pixel shader versions in DirectX 8.0.

The fact that that registry key exists indicates that we did some experiments in the driver, not that we are half way done implementing pixel shaders on RADEON.

The R100 introduced HyperZ, an early culling technology (maybe inspired by the Tile Rendering present in St Microelectronics PowerVR chips) that became the way to go in graphic evolution and generation by generation rendering optimization, and can be considerend the first non tile rendering-based (and so DX7 compatible) card to use a Z-Buffer optimization.

A slower and short-lived Radeon SDR (with 32 MB SDRAM memory) was added in mid-2000 to compete with the GeForce2 MX.

The card runs at a lower 143 MHz clock rate for both RAM and GPU, and its Hyper Z functionality has been disabled.

The increased density and various tweaks to the architecture allowed the GPU to function at higher clock speeds.

Around the time that the Radeon 8500 and 7500 were announced, rival Nvidia released its GeForce 3 Ti500 and Ti200, the 8500 and Ti500 are direct competitors but the 7500 and Ti200 are not.