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ATI RADEON 9000 Pro Preview July 18, 2002 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: ATI's RADEON 9000 Pro is poised to bring DirectX 8 gaming to the sub-$150 value market. In today's article, we take a brief look at the changes ATI has made in this new core and see how it stacks up against the competition from NVIDIA. Find out how it fares in our latest article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 9 ) |
What a difference a day makes
Over the past sixteen hours, we’ve witnessed some remarkable new technology from ATI. Not only was ATI’s flagship, next-generation DirectX 9 card introduced to us (the RADEON 9700) we also learned the first details of ATI’s new entrants in the value market – the RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 Pro. With its 8-pixel pipeline architecture and four vertex engines, RADEON 9700 doubles the feature set of anything else on the market in many key areas. Just as staggering is its 325 million triangles/second transform rate and its unique ability to process up to sixteen textures per pass.
Unfortunately, with so little time between production introduction and our press embargo being lifted, we had to pick our battle: write a full-fledged feature on the RADEON 9700, which isn’t currently available and will retail for $399, or go with the RADEON 9000/9000 Pro which we did receive and will ship at a much more attainable price point: $109 for the RADEON 9000, and $129 for the RADEON 9000 Pro. With the hardware in our hands today and the RADEON 9000’s attractive features list, we decided to go with the board that may not drop quite as many jaws in awe, but will instead have a much broader mainstream appeal. After all, there aren’t many consumers that are willing to fork over $400 on a graphics card just yet.
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So what does ATI have in store for the RADEON 9000 series? Surprisingly, quite a bit. Contrary to early rumors, RADEON 9000 (or as it was internally codenamed, R250) is a lot more than just a RADEON 8500 with a higher clock speed, or even an 8500 with a stripped feature set. For RADEON 9000, ATI started with a clean slate. Obviously the goal was to produce a variant of the RADEON 8500 that was cheaper to produce, but at the same time ATI’s engineers didn’t want to sacrifice performance, instead the goal was to enhance performance as much as possible while keeping costs to a minimum. In fact, the RADEON 9000 is more expensive to produce than the RADEON 7500 and therefore the RADEON 7500 family will live on in the lower portion of the value market, while the RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 Pro will completely replace RADEON 8500 and its variants in the value space. But what has changed between RADEON 8500 and RADEON 9000? Lets take a look at the specs.
SIDEBAR: The RADEON 9700 has been in development for the past 18 months.
| Specifications | Page:: ( 2 / 9 ) |
The list
3D Graphics Features
SMOOTHVISION
CHARISMA ENGINE II
HYPERZ II
Video Features
Display features
Notes
As expected, the key difference in the 9000 and the 9000 Pro lies in clock speed, the 9000’s core clock frequency operates at 250MHz, while its DDR memory runs at 400MHz. In the case of the 9000 Pro, the core clock runs at 275MHz and is paired with 550MHz DDR memory.
In fact, with RADEON 9000 ATI has removed one of the vertex shaders originally present in RADEON 8500. Instead of going with dual pipes, ATI instead chose to go with one really fast shader. While RADEON 8500 was capable of processing up to 65 million triangles/second via its dual pipelines, RADEON 9000 can output 75 million with its single vertex pipeline. This “less is more” approach is also applied to the texture units. With RADEON 9000, ATI has implemented a single texture unit per pixel pipe (versus two in RADEON 8500). As a result of these changes, RADEON 9000 performs faster than RADEON 8500 in scenes with simple polygons (which really stresses RADEON 9000s triangles/sec advantage), but offers less performance than the RADEON 8500 in scenes with multiple polygons and with ATI’s TRUFORM technology enabled.
One other addition ATI has implemented with the RADEON 9000 is the integration of dual 400MHz DACs and TV encoder is all integrated on the RADEON 9000 die. With RADEON 9000, the separate Rage Theater chip is no longer necessary.
SIDEBAR: ATI has 10 manufacturers lined up for the RADEON 9000/9000 Pro launch
| System Setup | Page:: ( 3 / 9 ) |
Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz (533MHz bus)
ASUS P4T533
256MB PC1066 RDRAM
ATI RADEON 9000 Pro 64MB
NVIDIA GeForce4 MX460 reference board
Driver version Detonator 29.44
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
AFREEY 12X DVD-ROM
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
Desktop Resolution: 1024x768x32
Benchmarks
3DMark 2001 Second Edition - 32-bit color, 32-bit textures
Quake 3 Retail - High Quality
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter - Normal (32-bit) The Elephant Atrium demo
Jedi Knight II – High Quality
SIDEBAR: The RADEON 9700 development team is the team that designed the graphics for Nintendo’s Gamecube console
| 3DMark 2001 | Page:: ( 4 / 9 ) |
3DMark 2001 - DirectX 8
SIDEBAR: Besides a lower transistor count, RADEON 9000 boards are also cheaper to produce than RADEON 8500 boards
| 3DMark2001 Framerates | Page:: ( 5 / 9 ) |
3DMark 2001 - Car Chase
3DMark 2001 - Dragothic
3DMark 2001 - Lobby
3DMark 2001 - Nature
SIDEBAR: We were also told that the RADEON 9000/9000 Pro contains a larger texture cache than RADEON 8500, although an exact figure wasn’t given
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 6 / 9 ) |
Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: We used the Elephant Atrium demo for testing with Serious Sam 2.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 7 / 9 ) |
Quake III - High Quality
SIDEBAR: ATI will be showcasing the R300 publicly at id’s QuakeCon convention next month
| Jedi Knight II | Page:: ( 8 / 9 ) |
Jedi Knight II
SIDEBAR: Our 9000 Pro reference board features 3.3ns memory from Hynix Semiconductor
| Final Thoughts | Page:: ( 9 / 9 ) |
While we’ve only had our RADEON 9000 Pro board for less than a day, we can clearly see the potential RADEON 9000 Pro brings to the table. What ATI has essentially done with the RADEON 9000 series is bring DirectX 8 gaming to the $100 price point. In our opinion, this is definitely a good thing.
Already we see signs of the RADEON 9000 Pro’s potential in Serious Sam 2 and 3Dmark 2001, although it still lags behind in older games such as Quake 3. During the RADEON 9000 launch, we were told that ATI focused the hardware design on DirectX 8 games with the RADEON 9000, with older, legacy games taking a backseat in terms of performance. Quite simply, the hardware emphasis for RADEON 9000 was focused more on the programmable engines present in today’s latest DirectX 8 games rather than the fixed function pipelines in older DX7 games. With many of these older applications, the RADEON 8500 will actually come ahead of RADEON 9000 in terms of performance.
Does this make the RADEON 9000 a bad successor to the RADEON 8500? In our opinion, no. With DirectX 8 gaming finally beginning to take off, we feel ATI did the right thing by focusing on DirectX 8 game performance, as the RADEON 9000 Pro core is more than capable of sustaining sufficient frame rates with older applications, and thanks to its pixel and vertex shaders, is also capable of running the latest and greatest DirectX 8 games. And with its sub-$130 price, DirectX 8 hardware has truly hit the mainstream price point.
The ATI RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 Pro are shipping today in 64MB configurations. We’re unaware if any plans are in the immediate works for a 128MB variant. As it stands now, the RADEON 9000 series looks very promising, but over the course of the next few weeks we’ll be running more tests to evaluate all aspects of its performance and features.
SIDEBAR: What do you think of the RADEON 9000 Pro? Would you have preferred a RADEON 9700 preview instead? Voice your thoughts in the comments!