10 Facts About R300

R300 GPU, introduced in August 2002 and developed by ATI Technologies, is its third generation of GPU used in Radeon graphics cards.

R300 was the first fully Direct3D 9-capable consumer graphics chip.

The architecture of R300 was quite different from its predecessor, Radeon 8500, in nearly every way.

R300 was the first board to truly take advantage of a 256-bit memory bus.

The R300 offered advanced anisotropic filtering which incurred a much smaller performance hit than the anisotropic solution of the GeForce4 and other competitors' cards, while offering significantly improved quality over Radeon 8500's anisotropic filtering implementation which was highly angle dependent.

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Performance and quality increases offered by the R300 GPU are considered to be one of the greatest in the history of 3D graphics, alongside the achievements GeForce 256 and Voodoo Graphics.

R300 would become one of the GPUs with the longest useful lifetime in history, allowing playable performance in new games at least 3 years after its launch.

Since all of the R300 chips were based on the same physical die, ATI's margins on 9500 products were low.

R300 developing that memory went bankrupt and the RAM never arrived, so ATI was forced to use regular DDR SDRAM.

Worthy of note regarding the R300-based generation is that the entire lineup utilized single-slot cooling solutions.