To say that I am excited about this card would be an understatement.  Not since the days of the Voodoo5 5500 have we had a serious contender for the NVIDIA speed crown.  Don’t get me wrong, I love NVIDIA’s products, and own several of them; but serious competition only makes the market better for all of us.  The Radeon 8500 was a valiant attempt, but in the end NVIDIA was able to out muscle the 8500 with the newer GeForce4 series of cards.  This time, it looks like ATI has accomplished their goal, and in a convincing fashion.  Not content to be equal to the NVIDIA cards, the Radeon 9700 Pro smashes the GeForce4 Ti4600 in nearly every benchmark, and has established ATI as the leader in the high-end video market.

The Radeon 9700 Pro is the latest in the Radeon series from ATI, boasting a wide array of new advanced features and technology.  This card is targeted at the high-end gamer, challenging the GeForce4 Ti4600 for top honors.  We are not talking budget cards here, this is the balls to the wall, framerate at all costs segment of the market.  Before we get into the performance numbers and charts, let us have a look at what features the Radeon 9700 Pro brings to the table.

The Radeon 9700 Pro is based on the R300 GPU, boasting more than 110 million transistors.  The GPU uses a .15m process like its predecessor the Radeon 8500, and the rival GeForce4 series.  The Radeon is AGP 8X capable, although there have been issues with some of the 8X motherboards on the market which we will cover later in the review.  The new GPU includes full support for the yet to be released DirectX 9, meaning that there is nothing this card cannot do, now and into the holiday season.  Memory bandwidth is an amazing 20 GB/sec, besting even the mighty GeForce4 Ti4600’s 10.4 GB/sec by a wide margin.  Eight pixel-rendering pipelines, with one texture unit per pipeline are capable of rendering up to 16 textures per pass, easily surpassing the 4-texture per pass abilities of the Ti4600. 

A 256-bit DDR memory interface, utilizing Hyper Z III technology fights the memory bottleneck issue prevalent in modern video cards.  For those of you not up on  PR terminology, Hyper Z III is ATI’s way of analyzing and eliminating overdraw.  We know that as an image is rendered on the screen, the video card typically textures and renders every forward facing pixel, that is, any pixel that faces the viewer.  With the complex scenes of the modern video games, many of these pixels were hidden behind other objects, and the overhead used to render them was completely wasted.  You may recall the Kyro II’s tile-based rendering, which eased the burden of overdraw, giving the card a significant speed boost.  While the Radeon 9700 Pro does not use Tile-Based rendering, it does perform calculations on each pixel to determine it’s relationship to the z-axis, and can thereby determine if the pixel will be visible or not.  If we cannot see it, the card does not waste precious time rendering it.

SmartShader 2.0 technology gives the 9700 Pro programmable pixel and vertex shaders, allowing nearly limitless visual effects.  The new Vertex Shader allows for up to 1024 instructions in a single pass, and the Pixel Shader is now capable of 160 instructions per pass.  These new advances give the 9700 Pro the ability to render extremely realistic scenes and textures.  Developers can now use realistic fur, shadow volume, extremely detailed lighting, and even varying properties of material across a single surface.  Of course, this is just a partial list of the new features, and most of the terminology means little to us, so just think amazing graphics.  Programmable shaders are what make a GPU truly a Graphical Processing Unit, unlike early attempts at GPUs in the first GeForce cards.  These second generation GPUs allow the developers to actually create their own effects, rather than choose from a predefined set of effects created by the GPU manufacturer.

ATI’s Smoothvision Anti-Aliasing technology has been improved, bringing the Radeon 9700 Pro to version 2.0.  Along with the Anti-Aliasing, the Radeon 9700 Pro is capable of 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x Anisotropic Filtering.  This technology adds clarity to the distant textures, and removes that muddy image quality often seen on the horizons and edges of a rendered scene.  Like Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering is the latest in a long line of image quality improvements introduced to the video scene.  It is nice to see emphasis shifting from raw framerate to image quality and speed, something pioneered by 3dfx with the Voodoo5 5500 and FSAA.

TruForm 2.0 delivers high order surfaces, making smoother, more realistic rounded shapes and higher poly count models.  According to the ATI website, this can be done without the need to change existing artwork.  A true rounded surface would be the holy grail of computer modeling, at least as far as games are concerned, and TruForm is an attempt to resolve this issue.  Imagine a game world where the character heads are really round and not mishapen lumps straight out of 9th grade geometry class.  This is especially true for flight sim, where image quality is one of the main selling points for a title.

For the PC home theater guys, ATI has you covered, too.  The 9700’s new VideoShader technology is designed remove the blockiness normally seen in video and streaming media.  Using the power of the pixel shaders, the VideoShader can make visible improvements in video playback.  The second feature aimed at video playback is the Fullstream technology.  Here is the ATI definition: FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology that removes blocky artifacts (noise removal filtering) for captured video and provides sharper image quality.  Together, the results are an improved image quality for video playback.  Maybe we could finally see the integration of the PC into the living room entertainment center?  Sounds like a future project for our staff.

Hydravision makes an appearance on the Radeon 9700.  The ablility for a card to utilize multiple displays is quickly becoming a required feature, although many users never even connect the second display.  We’ve used it for presentations and for flight sim titles, and it can be quite useful.  The Radeon 9700 Pro can output to two separate devices, and allows the refresh rate to be set differently on each device.  ATI includes a DVI to VGA adapter to run two standard monitors should you not own a flat panel display.  S-Video out is available as a third option.

Before we skip to the main feature listing from the ATI website, here is a comparison chart of the major players in the current graphics market.  At least on paper, the Radeon 9700 Pro should destroy anything else on the shelf.  Of course, we have seen the cards not live up to the papers, so check out the benchmarks before you make any assumptions.