3. Mobility Radeon 7500 - Feature Rich And Ready To Rumble!

To properly examine the rich features of the Mobility Radeon 7500, it is important to understand that much of the technological evolution of the Mobility Radeon 7500 has its roots in other mobile GPUs that ATI has developed. Although other companies have introduced features that they claim as "new" or "cutting edge" in the mobile space, many of these claims are false. Perhaps ATI did not sufficiently point out or hype these features in their products, but the truth remains that many of these so-called "new" features have already been available in previous ATI mobile GPUs.

As we explained above, the Mobility Radeon 7500 is built upon much of the same design strategy as the desktop version of the Radeon 7500. Thus, you can expect that the majority of the technology featured in the desktop version of the Radeon 7500 has made its way to the Mobility Radeon 7500. Our own Tom covered the Radeon 7500 in the following article: Radeon 7500 - Also Released Today, which examined the basic technology behind the Radeon 7500. Perhaps the best way to think of the Mobility Radeon 7500 is as a combination of the ATI Mobility Series GPUs and the added features from the desktop Radeon series cards.

The Mobility Radeon 7500 takes the logical step of integrating features such as the memory, multimedia, TV out and TMDS right on the chip. High-level packaging and chip integration are well established at ATI. (Of course, different variations of the Mobility Radeon 7500 can have different features, e.g., some versions feature external memory, others feature internal memory.) ATI packs as much as they can into the chip itself, which takes up less space on the board, uses less power, and costs less. The user benefits from this integration by getting thinner, lighter laptop designs, longer battery life, and desktop graphics performance in a portable package, all at a more competitive price. Talk about the best of all worlds!

ATI continues to be a pioneer in integration. The Mobility Radeon 7500 features the following specifications:

Radeon 7500 Mobility M7 GPU Operating at 270 MHz @ 1.5V LVDS: QXGA 64 MB 128 bit DDR Video Ram Operating at 210 MHz Transform, Clipping, and Lighting Support Two 3D Rendering pipelines 3 textures per pixel POWERPlay Support HydraVision Support LVDS: UXGA TMDS: UXGA 2X/4X AGP Support TV Out VGA Out Support Dynamic Voltage and Frequency modulation Frame Modulation

A major problem with LCD panels found in most notebooks is that they are limited to an 18 bit color depth (6 bits per color component). Although it is possible to change the color setting in the control panel to 32 bit color, it really makes no difference in visual quality. ATI addresses this issue in the Mobility Radeon 7500 with its new Frame Modulation technology, which brings the 18 bit LCD panels up to 24 bit, improving the overall quality of the display. Frame modulation creates intermediate color levels, which lead to an 8 bit-per-color component that uses temporal and special dithering. We were able to notice some difference in the color performance in side-by-side comparisons. We found the color output of the Mobility Radeon 7500 to be significantly more vibrant and true, comparable to the output of a desktop-based card.

Another area where ATI continues to excel is in the performance of DVD playback. Let's face it: one of the most used features on a typical laptop is DVD playback. Whether traveling on a plane or in a car, people enjoy watching movies on their laptops to pass the time. This fact has not been ignored by the folks at ATI. ATI refers to this as its Video Immersion technology. Like the other cards in the Radeon product family, ATI includes hardware-based iDCT motion compensation and, on the Mobility Radeon 7500, ATI also includes its new Adaptive Per-Pixel de-interlacing technology. With this technology leap, you will notice no feathering, no twitter, and good vertical resolution. The Adaptive Per-Pixel technology searches for motion in the DVD source material and optimally selects BOB or WEAVE, depending on whether or not motion is detected at the individual pixel level. When this is added to the Mobility Radeon 7500's power saving technology, the result is one of the most efficient mobile DVD playback GPUs.

The Mobility Radeon 7500 includes support for transform, clipping and lighting. Using two 3D rendering pipelines, the Mobility Radeon 7500 is able to handle up to three textures per pixel. Coupled with 64 MB of 128 bit DDR memory, you can see that the specifications for the Mobility Radeon 7500 are impressive for a mobile GPU.