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ATI RADEON 9700 PRO Review October 23, 2002 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: With its powerful 325MHz core and 620MHz memory subsystem, the RADEON 9700 PRO is the most powerful graphics card we've tested. But how has ATI's driver development matured and what about the AGP 8x issues that have been reported? We discuss these topics, overclocking, and more in our RADEON 9700 PRO review, check it out!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 18 ) |
It has been just over two months since we brought you our initial preview of the RADEON 9700 PRO with benchmarks, as you can imagine quite a few developments have occurred since then.Most importantly, RADEON 9700 PRO boards have hit retail shelves. Some of you reading this article may already have your RADEON 9700 PRO, or perhaps it’s on the way. In fact, not only are ATI RADEON 9700 PRO boards hitting stores, third-party manufacturers boards are also available. We’ll be bringing you reviews of these boards in the coming weeks.
However, the key reason we held off on reviewing the RADEON 9700 PRO back in August was because we wanted to test the board under multiple system configurations. Back in August AGP 8x platforms weren’t available to test the RADEON 9700 PRO’s prowess and compatibility, now we’ve got AGP 8x platforms based on chipsets from VIA and SiS, with Intel’s AGP 8x chipset “Granite Bay” on the brink of release. We also wanted to test the RADEON 9700 PRO extensively on the Athlon platform. We explored this aspect last month when we tested the RADEON 9700 PRO on Athlon and Athlon XP processors ranging from 1-2GHz.
Now that we’ve spent more time with the RADEON 9700 PRO, we feel it’s time to address all of these topics and more in an official review. Lets get started.
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First, we’ve already covered the features of the RADEON 9700 PRO core in greater detail in our preview article, so if you’d like to read up on what makes it so special, please refer back to that article as we devoted a considerable amount of time to that topic. We’ll still go over the features in this article as well but we’d rather devote more time to the RADEON 9700 PRO experience itself, rather than discuss specs.
SIDEBAR: ATI RADEON 9700 PRO Product page
| Specifications | Page:: ( 2 / 18 ) |
As the world’s first DirectX 9 graphics accelerator, it goes without saying that the RADEON 9700 PRO is in a class of its own. However, with DirectX 9 still nonexistent, it’s also very apparent that we won’t be seeing any DirectX 9 titles shipping this year. With this in mind, ATI has designed the RADEON 9700 PRO to be the ultimate DirectX 7/8 graphics card. This will likely make it amongst the last of the “hybrid” cards that fuse the fixed function pipelines needed for pre-DirectX 8 games (Quake 3 being one of the most popular) with the programmable pixel and vertex shaders we’ve come to know and love so much.
We’ve included this handy chart that sums up pretty succinctly how RADEON 9700 PRO compares to NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4600 on paper, we’ll see how it performs a little bit later in our actual benchmark tests:
The key specs that really stand out on the RADEON 9700 PRO is its eight-pixel pipeline architecture, double that of anything else currently available on the market. When combined with the RADEON 9700 PRO’s 325MHz core, this gives the RADEON 9700 PRO a fill-rate of 2.6 billion pixels per second, over twice that of GeForce4 Ti 4600. Equally impressive is its 256-bit memory interface, another industry first. As a result, memory bandwidth tops out at just under 20GB/sec, another doubling in comparison to GeForce4 Ti 4600.
What does this mean to today’s games? With so much bandwidth available to the RADEON 9700 PRO’s powerful 3D core, gamers should have no problems cranking up the screen resolution while at the same time turning on eye candy goodies such as anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing. Even with the screen resolution cranked up to 1600x1200, we were still able to break 100 frames per second in Quake 3 with 4x AA enabled and 8x anisotropic filtering in our tests.
Again, this is just a small selection of what makes the RADEON 9700 PRO so special, particularly relating to today’s games. It also supports next generation features such as 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders, and 128-bit floating-point data precision, resulting in scenes with high-fidelity, vibrant color ranges. We know the cliché gets used a lot, but the end result is extremely lifelike images, rivaling those found in the movie industry. In fact ATI has already demonstrated RADEON 9700 PRO rendering scenes from the movie Lord of the Rings.
SIDEBAR: ATI has also posted pictures from their RADEON 9000/9700 launch event in San Francisco on their website.
| Visual Quality | Page:: ( 3 / 18 ) |
That brings us to our next topic of discussion, visual quality. For those of you who are no doubt wondering, in terms of 2D visual quality, the RADEON 9700 PRO surpasses the GeForce4 Ti 4600 reference board. Text is considerably sharper and colors are livelier, resulting in a clear, sharp desktop.
Keep in mind that this is entirely subjective, but in our opinion it doesn’t take a magnifying glass or a 24” monitor to see the difference. Even with the 17” Samsung SyncMaster 700NFs that we use on the test beds (that are capable of resolutions up to 1600x1200) we could see the difference at resolutions as low as 1024x768. Therefore we can say with a fair amount of certainty that end users will appreciate the 2D visuals the RADEON 9700 PRO brings to the table.
SMOOTHVISION 2.0
In terms of 3D visuals, the RADEON 9700 PRO is just as eager to please. For anti-aliasing (AA), ATI has responded to consumer requests by offering two forms of anti-aliasing with the RADEON 9700 PRO: multi-sampling and super-sampling. If you recall, the RADEON 8500 employed the latter method, super-sampling, specifically rotated-grid super-sampling and programmable jittered super-sampling.
Super-sampling does a good job of removing the jagged edges and “crawlies” that are notoriously present in flight simulations and sports titles (specifically auto racing and football) but it does so at a huge performance hit to the graphics accelerator’s fill-rate. As a result, many RADEON 8500 owners left anti-aliasing off.
With multi-sampling, the Z-buffer is used to determine if the pixel is covered by multiple polygons. If the pixel is covered, an average of the foreground and background colors is used to determine the final color of the pixel. This method is more efficient than super-sampling, as the scene isn’t rendered multiple times. This conserves memory bandwidth (and thus doesn’t come with the performance hit of super-sampling), although the downside is that texture resolution isn’t as high.
The RADEON 9700 PRO supports anti-aliasing modes of 2, 4, or 6 samples per pixel. We’ve provided the following screenshots for comparison to GeForce4:
Keep in mind that screenshots really aren’t the best way to judge AA quality, as it’s highly subjective. You really should sit in front of a monitor and judge for yourself which implementation you prefer.
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One area where ATI does have a distinct advantage over NVIDIA however is in its anisotropic filtering (AF). Not only is ATI’s AF implementation more powerful (supporting modes of 2, 4, 8, or 16 texture samples per pixel) it’s also more flexible: for end users who want the ultimate in visual quality, trilinear samples are taken at the expense of some performance when anisotropic filtering is running with the “quality” setting enabled. If more performance is desired, the “performance” setting is also available, which uses bilinear samples.
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SIDEBAR: Quality is the default AF setting
| Drivers/Compatibility/Heat | Page:: ( 4 / 18 ) |
CATALYST drivers
ATI’s driver development team has made tremendous strides the past 12 months. It wasn’t too long ago that the RADEON 8500’s drivers were preventing it from keeping up with GeForce3, now we’re truly seeing the card’s potential, as it outperforms GeForce3 in most cases.
Things really kicked into high gear with ATI’s CATALYST drivers that were launched this summer. The CATALYST team has committed itself to providing stable drivers that are also no slouch when it comes to performance. Just important however is the level of commitment ATI has devoted to its CATALYST drivers. Driver updates are frequent, and promptly posted on ATI’s website. For the RADEON 9700 PRO we’ve noticed three driver updates since early September, two in particular were released to address bugs with certain games. ATI has tucked these two driver updates away in their website so you may have to dig around a bit (checking ATI fan sites is always a good idea), we wish they’d provide a “beta” area on their official site for end users who would like to experiment with unofficial drivers like these a little bit.
The RADEON 9700 PRO drivers have come a long way from the ones we tested back in August. They’re now much more mature and features that weren’t working properly (such as TRUFORM) are present although again, you’ll have to download the latest driver to take advantage of these additions.
We’re glad to see that the bugs that were present in the RADEON 9700 PRO drivers just a few months ago have now been squashed and would certainly grade them as “A” quality in Windows XP, we haven’t run tests with them in Windows 2000 or Windows 98/ME.
Heat
With 110 million transistors (twice that of Intel’s Northwood Pentium 4 CPU) packed inside a 0.15-micron core, it’s no surprise that the RADEON 9700 PRO core can get pretty hot. ATI utilizes flip-chip packaging to help combat this, but heat is still very present. It isn’t just the graphics core itself that gets hot, it’s the entire card: the 9700 PRO chip, the memory chips, the PCB, and especially the heat spreader on the back of the board.
We test our systems in an open-air environment and even in this surrounding we could feel the warm air lingering around all sides of the RADEON 9700 PRO board. Therefore those of you with cramped system cases may want to optimize the airflow within your case to ensure reliable operation of your RADEON 9700 PRO.
Compatibility
As one of the world’s first AGP 8x accelerators, we were eager to test the RADEON 9700 PRO with VIA’s KT400 chipset for the Athlon platform and the SiS 648 chipset for the Pentium 4. While the KT400 motherboards we tested worked flawlessly with RADEON 9700 PRO, we can’t say that we encountered the same results with our motherboards based on the SiS 648 chipset, even SiS’ own reference motherboard refused to run reliably with RADEON 9700 PRO.
Regardless of the motherboard BIOS/driver combinations we attempted, we couldn’t get the system to run with the stability we’d consider satisfactory, much less reliable. Again, we witnessed this with multiple SiS 648 motherboards, not just the ASUS P4S8X (which has many documented cases of being incompatible). Therefore, we can’t recommend this particular hardware combination to our readers at this point.
SIDEBAR: ASUS has released a BIOS that was designed to address the RADEON 9700 stability issues with the P4S8X, but we still couldn’t get the system to run stable with this BIOS.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 5 / 18 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon XP 2600+
MSI KT4 Ultra
256MB Muskin PC3200 DDR SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
Driver version 6.13.10.6193
ATI RADEON 9000 PRO
ATI RADEON 8500
Driver version 6.13.10.6166
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
NVIDIA GeForce3
Detonator Driver Version: 40.71
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
Desktop resolution 1024x768, 32-bit color, 75Hz refresh
Benchmarks
3D Mark 2001 Second Edition Build 330 – 32-bit color
Quake III: Arena version 1.17 – demo 001
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter – Elephant Atrium demo
Unreal Tournament 2003 – Flyby average
Jedi Knight II – jk2ffa demo
SIDEBAR: We used the retail version of Unreal Tournament 2003 for this review.
| 3D Mark 2001 | Page:: ( 6 / 18 ) |
3DMark 2001 - DirectX 8
Notes
GeForce4 Ti 4600 trails RADEON 9700 PRO by six percent at low resolutions in 3DMark 2001, but by the time the screen resolution is increased to 1280x1024, the RADEON 9700 PRO is able to open up the gap to 14% thanks to its greater memory bandwidth.
SIDEBAR: The RADEON 9700 PRO sports BGA memory chips, just like GF4 Ti 4600.
| 3D Mark 2001 – Frame Rates | Page:: ( 7 / 18 ) |
3DMark 2001 - Car Chase
3DMark 2001 - Dragothic
3DMark 2001 - Lobby
3DMark 2001 - Nature
SIDEBAR: ATI uses TSMC’s 0.15-micron manufacturing process for the RADEON 9700 PRO.
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 8 / 18 ) |
Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL
Notes
Lower resolutions tend to favor the other graphics cards in Serious Sam, RADEON 9700 PRO finishes dead last. But of course, if you’re intent on purchasing a RADEON 9700 PRO, you won’t be held to 800x600, you’ll be gaming at 1600x1200. And at that resolution, the RADEON 9700 PRO outperformed GeForce4 Ti 4600 by 11%.
SIDEBAR: ATI recently demonstrated a RADEON 9700 PRO board with DDR-II memory. It will be interesting to see if they decrease the memory bus to 128 bits with this memory type.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 9 / 18 ) |
Quake III - High Quality
Notes
With its greater fill-rate and memory bandwidth, RADEON 9700 PRO is able to outshine GeForce4 Ti 4600 at high resolutions. At 1600x1200, the RADEON 9700 PRO outran the Ti 4600 by 21%.
SIDEBAR: DDR-II memory would likely make its debut in ATI’s next graphics part, codenamed R350.
| Jedi Knight II - OpenGL | Page:: ( 10 / 18 ) |
Jedi Knight II
Notes
Jedi Knight II is more CPU-bound than the other games we’ve tested with, from resolutions of 800x600 to 1600x1200 the frame rate hardly changes! We do see the RADEON 9700 PRO outgunning the GeForce4 Ti 4600 by 12% at 1600x1200.
SIDEBAR: R350 is also rumored to be built on a 0.13-micron manufacturing process; this would allow ATI to put even more features on the chip.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo | Page:: ( 11 / 18 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 demo - flyby
Notes
Unreal Tournament is a little more demanding than the other games we’ve tested with, and as such it’s able to separate itself from GeForce4 Ti 4600 a little more than in other tests. The margin is 29% at 1600x1200.
SIDEBAR: ATI actually manufactured a lot of the early third-party RADEON 9700 boards.
| 2x Anti-Aliasing | Page:: ( 12 / 18 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
Under the greater demands of 2x anti-aliasing, RADEON 9700 PRO is able to pull away from GeForce4 Ti 4600 even more than in Unreal Tournament; the cards are separated by 35%. RADEON 9700 PRO runs over 1.5 times faster than GeForce4 Ti 4600.
SIDEBAR: The Gigabyte RADEON 9700 card actually ships with heatsinks on the memory.
| 4x Anti-Aliasing | Page:: ( 13 / 18 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
It’s amazing to see the RADEON 9700 PRO dishing out over 100 frames per second at 1600x1200 with 4x AA enabled; that is 2.5 times more performance than GeForce4 Ti 4600! Finally 4xAA can finally be considered playable regardless of screen resolution.
SIDEBAR: ATI now has two design teams working full-time on new cores.
| 2x Anisotropic filtering | Page:: ( 14 / 18 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
The performance hit of 2x anisotropic filtering is considerably smaller with RADEON 9700 PRO than GeForce4 Ti 4600. At 1024x768 we see a performance hit of less than one percentage point at 1024x768 (compared to 13% for GeForce4 Ti 4600) and opens up to three percent at 1600x1200.
SIDEBAR: ATI refers to the RADEON 9700 PRO as a “VPU”. VPU stands for visual processing unit.
| 8x Anisotropic filtering | Page:: ( 15 / 18 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
Going up to 8x anisotropic filtering, the performance hit at lower resolutions is marginal in comparison to 2x aniso. The margins stay the same until we hit 1600x1200, where the performance impact is 6%. In comparison, GeForce4 Ti 4600 loses 36% of its performance.
SIDEBAR: DirectX 9 was initially limited to up to 1024 vertex instructions, however the spec has recently been changed to 65,026. The RADEON 9700 PRO supports these longer shaders.
| 4x AA/8x Aniso | Page:: ( 16 / 18 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
Notes
With 4xAA and 8x aniso turned on, we’re still getting very playable frame rates out of the RADEON 9700 PRO at 1600x1200. RADEON 9700 PRO boasts 2.5 times more performance than GeForce4 Ti 4600.
SIDEBAR: One recent design win for ATI was E-Machines. Who would’ve thought than an E-Machines PC would ship with such a powerful graphics card?
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 17 / 18 ) |
Pros
Performance: With its 325MHz core, the RADEON 9700 PRO is capable of pumping out over 325 million transformed and lit polygons per second and offers a fill-rate over twice that of NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4600. ATI has paired the RADEON 9700 PRO core with an equally impressive memory subsystem. Sporting a bus width of 256 bits, the RADEON 9700 PRO’s 620MHz DDR memory provides the RADEON 9700 PRO core with nearly 20GB/sec of bandwidth, also double that of GeForce4 Ti 4600.
As a result, it goes without saying that the RADEON 9700 PRO is one fast graphics accelerator. In many cases, it doubles the performance of GeForce4 Ti 4600, and comes close to tripling its performance in some tests. Therefore, if you crave the fastest graphics card money can buy, the RADEON 9700 PRO is the undisputed solution for you.
Features: As the world’s only DirectX 9 graphics accelerator, the RADEON 9700 PRO boasts many unique features that place it in a class of its own. You’ve got its fully floating-point pipeline that supports 128-bit color, ATI’s VIDEOSHADER and FULLSTREAM technologies, and HydraVision multi-monitor support are all some of its more notable features. And with ATI’s trade-up program, ATI offers flexible options for those of you looking to upgrade from your current graphics card.
Anisotropic filtering: The RADEON 9700 PRO offers the best anisotropic filtering implementation we’ve seen to date. Not only is ATI’s offering more powerful than NVIDIA’s, it also offers more flexibility. End users can choose from bilinear or trilinear samples depending on their preference of speed and image quality.
And speaking of image quality, the RADEON 9700 PRO’s anisotropic filtering simply looks better than NVIDIA’s. Simply look over our screenshots for proof.
Anti-aliasing: ATI has also improved their anti-aliasing performance by implementing multi-sampling. Now end users can enjoy gaming in a jaggie-free environment without sacrificing performance, the 2x AA mode is practically free with the RADEON 9700. In fact, even the 4x AA mode is quite playable at resolutions up to 1600x1200 with anisotropic filtering enabled. The end result is an extremely sharp, high-resolution image that is free of the jagged edges and other artifacts that get in the way of feeling like you’re in that particular environment.
AGP 8x: AGP 8x isn’t really necessary at this point, especially when you consider that the RADEON 9700 PRO sports 128MB of DDR memory with a 256-bit interface. But perhaps at some point later down the road when games with larger textures become more prevalent this will be a feature the RADEON 9700 PRO will really take advantage of.
Cons
Price: At an MSRP of $399, the RADEON 9700 PRO is by no means an inexpensive graphics card. Lets face it, for $400 you could purchase a nice CPU/motherboard/memory combination and still have a few bucks left over to pick up a copy of Serious Sam. But that’s the price you must pay if you want the latest and greatest, fortunately street prices on RADEON 9700 PRO boards are rapidly approaching the $300 mark.
Compatibility: We’ve run into numerous stability problems with motherboards based on the SiS 648 chipset, and they’re not entirely related to AGP 8x. Even when running in AGP 4x mode with these motherboards stability is still an issue. Some applications work better than others but we still wouldn’t consider the SiS 648/RADEON 9700 PRO combination to be reliable. We’ve read rumors that newer revisions of the RADEON 9700 PRO have resolved this issue, but we can’t confirm those stories at this time.
UPDATE: We've actually found that the RADEON 9700 PRO runs slower with the KT400 chipset than it does with KT333. Fortunately, the stability of this combination is excellent and the performance difference is marginal at high resolutions. In games such as Quake 3, the margin can be pretty significant, roughly 8%. Newer games such as UT 2003 show a much slimmer 2% or 3% hit when using the KT400/RADEON 9700 PRO combination.
SIDEBAR: The AGP 8x interface is physically identical to AGP 4x.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 18 / 18 ) |
FiringSquad says:
Teething problems aside, we still can’t help but be excited about ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO. Not only is it the fastest graphics card on the planet, it also boasts the best-looking image quality.
ATI has really addressed user complaints with the RADEON 8500, not only do we have improved anti-aliasing performance, we’ve also got enhanced anisotropic filtering as well. And in the software department, ATI’s CATALYST team is delivering unlike any previous driver effort from ATI in the past. With the RADEON 9700 PRO, ATI simply appears to have executed near flawlessly, this card offers everything we’ve wanted and more.
Sure, DirectX 9 games are still months away from release, but ATI has built the RADEON 9700 PRO to offer excellent performance with existing games currently available on the market. In fact, you can crank up the screen resolution, AA, and anisotropic filtering and still enjoy seamless performance and visual quality. With RADEON 9700 PRO, you truly can have your cake and eat it too.
The biggest complaint most of you probably have with the RADEON 9700 PRO is its $399 price tag. Fortunately, ATI hears you. While we can’t reveal much today, soon we will be able to unveil ATI’s plans to address this topic. We can tell you that RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9500/9500 PRO cards will be released shortly at very aggressive price points and offering very compelling feature sets. NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4200 and Ti 4600 are priced in a class of their own today, but ATI won’t leave these segments to NVIDIA alone for much longer.
The RADEON 9700 PRO is a giant leap over previous graphics accelerators. A year from now some may say comparing it to the DirectX 8 cards of the past is simply unfair. Consider everything the RADEON 9700 PRO offers for just one moment: you’ve got benchmark-crushing performance, excellent visual quality, and next-generation features that are designed towards the future. NVIDIA’s NV30 is still a no-show, leaving the high-end segment solely to ATI.
The Canadian company deserves a lot of credit for what they’ve done this summer; they’ve beaten NVIDIA to the punch in both the budget and enthusiast segments with the RADEON 9x00 family. We can’t wait to see what they do for an encore!
SIDEBAR: What do you think of RADEON 9700 PRO? Does ATI have a winner on its hands or will you wait for NV30? Voice your thoughts in the news comments!