Introduction

ATI has been on quite a roll the past twelve months. First, the Canadian firm released the RADEON 9700 PRO, the world’s first DirectX 9 graphics accelerator. The RADEON 9700 PRO was a significant leap forward from previous graphics architectures, not only did it support the 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders that are critical for DirectX 9 compliance, it also boasted a fully floating point pipeline that supports 128-bit floating point data formats. This feature gives the RADEON 9700 PRO the ability to perform all kinds of complicated math. As a result, images look incredibly lifelike; colors are more vibrant with a wide degree of ranges.

Of course, all this means nothing if the hardware can’t perform. To address this, ATI integrated eight pixel pipelines along with four vertex engines for pumping pixels and polygons, as well as a 256-bit memory interface for better performance with eye candy features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on. The end result was a product that was markedly better than anything else on the market. It’s a true testament to the design of the RADEON 9700 that it still holds up so well a year after it was initially released.

The evolution of ATI's R3xx architecture

RADEON 9800 comparison

The 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO is the longest

ATI built a worthy successor in the form of the RADEON 9800 PRO. The 9800 PRO addressed some of the shortcomings of the original RADEON 9700 architecture, its F-buffer allows it to support fragment shader programs of unlimited length. In addition, ATI reworked the 9800’s memory controller for better efficiency in bandwidth-intensive situations as well as enhancing its Z-cache to perform better with stencil buffers. ATI also made some board level changes to the RADEON 9800 to help combat heat.

When combined with the higher clock speeds the RADEON 9800 PRO shipped with, ATI had another winner on its hands.

We’re now a year removed from the original RADEON 9700 launch, and six months out from the RADEON 9800’s public unveiling. Following traditional graphics releases, it’s now time for a next generation product right?

You can see the length comparison real well in this shot

Both of these cards ship with 256MB of memory

The answer is not quite. While ATI is now following a strict 6-month product cycle, the graphics industry is still not quite ready to move to 3.0 pixel and vertex shaders, much less DirectX 10 (which is even further out from release). Instead, ATI has updated its graphics line with a pair of new products: the RADEON 9800 XT (formerly codenamed R360) on the high end and the RADEON 9600 XT for the mainstream market (formerly codenamed RV360). As their name suggests, neither product is a dramatic departure from previous offerings, rather ATI has updated both products for more performance.

Basically ATI has taken a good thing and made it even better. That’s always good right?