Starting out with the basics, AMD's RV770 core uses the now-established 55 nanometre manufacturing process, packing in 956 million transistors to bring us this DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0 supporting part, and again featuring tessellation hardware which won't see support in an official API until the release of DirectX 11.

RV770 certainly packs plenty into that transistor count, sporting a massive 800 Stream Processors to handle and process vertex, pixel and geometry shader data. These Stream Processors are arranged as arrays of sixteen units (or SIMD cores), of which there are ten. Each of these SIMD cores has a dedicated texturing unit (again making for ten in total), housing four texturing addressing processors, sixteen 32-bit floating point texture samplers and four 32-bit floating point texturing filtering units.