Radeon HD 2000 series

The HD 2900 GPU dies do not have a UVD core, as its stream processors were powerful enough to handle most of the steps of video acceleration in its stead except for entropy decoding and bitstream processing which are left for the CPU to perform.

Reports has that the first batch of the RV610 core (silicon revision A12), only being released to system builders, has a bug that hindered the UVD from working properly, but other parts of the die operated normally.

Those products were officially supported with the release of Catalyst 7.10 driver, which the cards were named as Radeon HD 2350 series.

[11] Several reports from owners of HD 2400 Pro suggest the card do not fully support hardware decoding for all H.264/VC-1 videos.

The device driver, even with the latest stable version, seem to only honor hardware decoding for formats specified in the Blu-ray and HD-DVD specification.

[12][13][14] The Radeon HD 2600 series was based on the codenamed RV630 GPU and packed 390 million transistors on a 65 nm fabrication process.

The Radeon HD 2600-series video cards included GDDR3 support, a 128-bit memory ring bus and 4-phase digital PWM,[9] spanning a die size of 153 mm2.

AMD calls this product the Radeon HD 2600 X2 as seen by some vendors and as observed inside the INF file of Catalyst 7.9 version 8.411.

Sapphire and other vendors including PowerColor and GeCube have either announced or demonstrated their respective dual GPU (connected by crossfire) products.

The Mobility Radeon HD 3600 series also featured the industry's first implementation of on-board 128-bit GDDR4 memory.

[25] The Mobility Radeon HD 3870 X2 was based on two M88 GPUs with the addition of a PCI Express switch chip on a single PCB.

This may be different for the AMD FirePro brand, which is based on identical hardware but features OpenGL-certified graphics device drivers.

The Purple Pill tool issue, which could allow unsigned drivers to be loaded into Windows Vista and tamper with the operating system kernel,[42] was resolved in the Catalyst 7.8 release (version 8.401).

Software CrossFire was enabled for HD 2600 and HD 2400 series video cards with the release of Catalyst 7.10 (package version 8.421) The Catalyst 8.1, package version 8.451, supports for MultiView technology for accelerated OpenGL rendering on multiple video card setup (CrossFire).

The Radeon HD 2000 series has been transitioned to legacy support, where drivers will be updated only to fix bugs instead of being optimized for new applications.

[49] Current Catalyst drivers do not support the AGP versions of Radeon HD 2000/3000 series cards with RIALTO bridge.

[52] The free and open-source "Radeon" graphics device drivers are not reverse engineered, but based on documentation released by AMD.

[53] Initial register documentation and parser code to execute the AtomBIOS ROM routines were released in September 2007.