Early generations were identified with a number and major/minor alphabetic prefix. Later generations were assigned code names. New or heavily redesigned architectures have a prefix of
R (e.g.,
R300 or
R600) while slight modifications are indicated by the
RV prefix (e.g.,
RV370 or
RV635). The first derivative architecture,
RV200, did not follow the scheme used by later parts.
Fixed-pipeline family R100/RV200 The Radeon, first introduced in 2000, was ATI's first graphics processor to be fully
DirectX 7 compliant.
R100 brought with it large gains in bandwidth and fill-rate efficiency through the new
HyperZ technology. The RV200 was a die-shrink of the former R100 with some core logic tweaks for clockspeed, introduced in 2002. The only release in this generation was the Radeon 7500, which introduced little in the way of new features but offered substantial performance improvements over its predecessors.
R200 ATI's
second generation Radeon included a
sophisticated pixel shader architecture. This chipset implemented Microsoft's pixel shader 1.4 specification for the first time. Its performance relative to competitors was widely perceived as weak, and subsequent revisions of this generation were cancelled to focus on development of the next generation.
R300/R350 The R300 was the first
GPU to fully support Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 technology upon its release in 2001. It incorporated fully programmable pixel and vertex shaders. About a year later, the architecture was revised to allow for higher frequencies, more efficient memory access, and several other improvements in the R350 family. A budget line of RV350 products was based on this refreshed design with some elements disabled or removed. Models using the new
PCI Express interface were introduced in 2004. Using 110-nm and 130-nm manufacturing technologies under the X300 and X600 names, respectively, the RV370 and RV380 graphics processors were used extensively by consumer PC manufacturers.
R420 While heavily based upon the previous generation, this line included extensions to the Shader Model 2 feature-set. Shader Model 2b, the specification ATI and Microsoft defined with this generation, offered somewhat more shader program flexibility.
R520 ATI's DirectX 9.0c series of graphics cards, with complete
shader Model 3.0 support. Launched in October 2005, this series brought a number of enhancements including the floating point render target technology necessary for
HDR rendering with
anti-aliasing.
TeraScale-family R600 ATI's first series of GPUs to replace the old fixed-pipeline and implement
unified shader model. Subsequent revisions tuned the design for higher performance and energy efficiency, resulting in the ATI Mobility Radeon HD series for mobile computers.
R700 Based on the R600 architecture. Mostly a bolstered with many more stream processors, with improvements to power consumption and GDDR5 support for the high-end RV770 and RV740(HD4770) chips. It arrived in late June 2008. The HD 4850 and HD 4870 have 800 stream processors and GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory, respectively. The 4890 was a refresh of 4870 with the same amount of stream processors yet higher clock rates due to refinements. The 4870x2 has 1600 stream processors and GDDR5 memory on an effective 512-bit memory bus with 230.4 Gbit/s video memory bandwidth available.
Evergreen The series was launched on 23 September 2009. It featured a 40 nm fabrication process for the entire product line (only the HD4770 (RV740) was built on this process previously), with more stream cores and compatibility with the next major version of the DirectX API,
DirectX 11, which launched on 22 October 2009 along with
Microsoft Windows 7. The Rxxx/RVxxx codename scheme was scrapped entirely. The initial launch consisted of only the 5870 and 5850 models. ATI released beta drivers that introduced full OpenGL 4.0 support on all variants of this series in March 2010.
Northern Islands This is the first series to be marketed solely under the "AMD" brand. It features a 3rd generation 40 nm design, rebalancing the existing architecture with redesigned shaders to give it better performance. It was released first on 22 October 2010, in the form of the 6850 and 6870. 3D output is enabled with HDMI 1.4a and
DisplayPort 1.2 outputs.
Graphics Core Next-family Southern Islands "Southern Islands" was the first series to feature the new compute microarchitecture known as "Graphics Core Next"(GCN).
GCN was used among the higher end cards, while the VLIW5 architecture utilized in the previous generation was used in the lower end, OEM products. However, the
Radeon HD 7790 uses
GCN 2, and was the first product in the series to be released by AMD on 9 January 2012.
Sea Islands The "Sea Islands" were OEM rebadges of the 7000 series, with only three products, code named Oland, available for general retail. The series, just like the "Southern Islands", used a mixture of VLIW5 models and GCN models for its desktop products.
Volcanic Islands "Volcanic Islands" GPUs were introduced with the AMD Radeon RX 200 series, and were first released in late 2013. The Radeon RX 200 line is mainly based on AMD's GCN architecture, with the lower end, OEM cards still using VLIW5. The majority of desktop products use GCN 1, while the
R9 290x/290 &
R7 260X/260 use GCN 2, and with only the R9 285 using the new
GCN 3.
Caribbean Islands GPUs codenamed "Caribbean Islands" were introduced with the AMD Radeon RX 300 series, released in 2015. This series was the first to solely use GCN based models, ranging from GCN 1st to GCN 3rd Gen, including the GCN 3-based Fiji-architecture models named Fury X, Fury, Nano and the Radeon Pro Duo.
Arctic Islands GPUs codenamed "Arctic Islands" were first introduced with the Radeon RX 400 series in June 2016 with the announcement of the
RX 480. These cards were the first to use the new Polaris chips which implements
GCN 4th Gen on the 14 nm fab process. The RX 500 series released in April 2017 also uses Polaris chips.
Vega RDNA-family RDNA 1 On 27 May 2019, at
COMPUTEX 2019,
AMD announced the new '
RDNA' graphics micro-architecture, which succeeded the
Graphics Core Next micro-architecture. This is the basis for the Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards, the first to be built under the codename 'Navi'. These cards feature
GDDR6 SGRAM and support for
PCI Express 4.0.
RDNA 2 On 5 March 2020,
AMD publicly announced its plan to release a "refresh" of the
RDNA micro-architecture. Dubbed as the
RDNA 2 architecture, it was stated to succeed the first-gen RDNA micro-architecture and was initially scheduled for a release in Q4 2020. RDNA 2 was confirmed as the graphics microarchitecture featured in the
Xbox Series X and Series S consoles from
Microsoft, and
PlayStation 5 from
Sony, with proprietary tweaks and different GPU configurations in each systems' implementation. AMD unveiled the
Radeon RX 6000 series, its next-gen RDNA 2 graphics cards at an online event on 28 October 2020. The lineup consists of the RX 6800, RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT. The RX 6800 and 6800 XT launched on 18 November 2020, with the RX 6900 XT being released on 8 December 2020. Further variants including a Radeon RX 6700 (XT) series based on Navi 22, launched on 18 March 2021, a Radeon RX 6600(XT) series based on Navi 23, launched on 11 August 2021 (that is the 6600XT release date, the RX 6600 launched on 13 October 2021), and a Radeon RX 6500(XT), launched on 19 January 2022.
RDNA 3 On 3 November 2022,
AMD announced the full details for the
RDNA 3 micro-architecture along with the RX 7900 XT and RX 7900 XTX at an event in
Las Vegas.
RDNA 4 On 28 February 2025,
AMD announced the
RDNA 4 micro-architecture along with the RX 9070 and the RX 9070 XT at an online event. On 21 May 2025, AMD announced the RX 9060 XT during its Computex keynote.
API overview Some generations vary from their predecessors predominantly due to architectural improvements, while others were adapted primarily to new manufacturing processes with fewer functional changes. The table below summarizes the APIs supported in each Radeon generation (including pre-Radeon ATI GPUs). Also see
AMD FireStream and
AMD FirePro branded products.
Feature overview == Graphics device drivers ==