Connect3D Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB

Author : Wayne Date : 26th September 2002

...Product	Connect3D Radeon 9700 Pro
...Manufacturer	Connect3D
...Supplier	The Overclocking Store
...Price	£287.86 (inc. VAT)

 

 

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Introduction :

Well, it's been nothing if not eventful in the graphics market this year. We've seen new assaults from SiS, Trident, Matrox and Creative, we've seen the switch from 0.15micron to 0.13micron announced and now, and perhaps the least expected of all we've seen NVIDIA's performance crown swiped from under their nose. At this precise moment in time, what is perhaps NVIDIA's biggest strength is also their biggest weakness. The religious way they've kept to their 6 month product cycle has if anything made them a little predictable and like a grand prix where the teams know each other's pit strategy that makes it a whole lot easier to get the jump on them. NVIDIA haven't technically missed their fall launch yet but already they must be feeling the pressure from ATi's recently released flagship Radeon 9700 PRO whose meticulously timed release gave it a front row seat that even the Detonator 40.41s couldn't take away from. It's always easier to impose yourself on a race when you're running from the front but do ATi have a strong enough product in the Radeon 9700 PRO to keep the pressure on and to mop up the pre festive season buyers? That's hopefully what we're going to find out today.

The card I get to put through its paces today was supplied thanks to Paul Dutton and the guys over at The Overclocking Store who are actually turning these babies out at a rather incredible £287.86 inc VAT which actually positions it cheaper than the majority of Ti4600s available at the moment. Manufactured by Connect3D this 'ATI Powered' Radeon 9700 PRO offers full retail spec at a price that has to make it a very tempting upgrade indeed.

ATi have never before had such an unquestionable performance advantage over their Santa Clara rivals but is it deserved, can it be sustained and does it work the way it says it does? Let's take a look!

The Tale Of The Tape :

overview
ATI revolutionizes the world of graphics technology with the RADEON™ 9700 Visual Processing Unit (VPU). Featuring fast 3D graphics performance, coupled with sophisticated real-time visual effects, unsurpassed image quality and cutting-edge video features, RADEON™ 9700 provides you with an amazing PC entertainment experience.

• First to fully support DirectX® 9.0
  With its new SMARTSHADER™ 2.0 technology, RADEON™ 9700 supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest OpenGL® functionality to give developers the freedom to create more complicated and realistic visual effects than ever before.
• First 8-pixel pipeline architecture
  RADEON™ 9700 is the first graphics technology capable of processing 8 pixels simultaneously - twice as many compared to any existing product. This highly optimized design provides top 3D performance for both Direct3D® and OpenGL® games and applications.
• 256-bit DDR memory interface
  The high-bandwidth memory interface of the RADEON™ 9700, utilizing the latest HYPER Z™ III bandwidth-conserving technology, removes a key performance bottleneck and provides end users with faster graphics performance.
• Support for AGP 8X specification
  RADEON™ 9700 supports the new AGP 8X standard, which allows large volumes of texture and vertex data to be transferred faster from system memory to the chip (2.0 GB/sec).
• First to use pixel shaders to accelerate video
  With ATI's new VIDEOSHADER™ technology, RADEON™ 9700 continues the tradition of providing industry-leading video and DVD playback. RADEON™ 9700 also offers FULLSTREAM™ - a new technology that removes blocky artifacts from video and provides sharper image quality.

System Requirements

• Radeon 9700 PRO requires connection to your PC's internal power supply for operation. A 300 watt power supply or greater is recommended to ensure normal system operation where a number of other internal devices are installed.
• Intel® Pentium® 4/III/II/Celeron™, AMD® K6/Duron™/Athlon®/Athlon XP® or compatible with AGP 2X (3.3v), 4X (1.5V), 8X (0.8v) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration (2X/4X/8X).
• 128MB of system memory
• Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
• DVD playback requires DVD drive

Mode Tables

Monitor Resolution	Hz
640x480	120
800x600	120
1024x768	120
1152x864	120
1280x1024	120
1600x1200	85
1920x1080* 16:9	75
1920x1200	75
1920x1440	75
2048x1536	60

65K colors	2048x1536
16.7M colors	2048x1536

 

Okay with the boring part (for most of you) out of the way let's just pick up on some of the more noteworthy features.

First of all a look at what it doesn't have rather than what it does. To begin with somewhere along the line ATi decided to sneakily drop W buffer support. Although ATi rightly state that this can be handled through the 9700's pixel/vertex shaders this can't be done for older games without the use of a patch. Okay so the gaming world won't grind to a halt because of the lack of W buffers but it will make life more difficult for developers of games like flight sims that by their very nature involve the rendering of vast terrain models. It seems the 9700 is now pretty much tied in to a 24bit Z buffer and 8bit Stencil buffer as indeed did the Radeon 8500 before it.

Next up I got to wondering what happened to the refresh rates? 60 to 75Hz at resolutions beyond 16x12 aren't going to please users of high end monitors and although I don't have a monitor capable of such settings I was a little bemused at having my refresh rate capped at 120Hz even at a baseline 800x600. This is certainly lower than the 9700's RAMDACs can manage.

But with the minus points aired let's take a more positive look at what's been added or improved. To begin with there's the GPU/VPU itself. This is now clocked at 325MHz which coupled with a 256bit memory bus and a memory clock of 310MHz offers an outstanding 19.8 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Unlike NVIDIA who are currently pioneering the switch to a 0.13micron process ATi played safe and stuck to a 0.15micron core with some 110million+ transistors, not that there's anything safe about the creation of such a complex piece of silicon.

On the GPU you'll find 8 pixel rendering pipelines capable of handling 16 textures in a single pass. There are also 4 programmable parallel vertex shaders onboard capable of capable of dealing with one vertex and one triangle per clock cycle. The vertex shader is also responsible for the new implementation of TRUFORM imaginatively known as TRUFORM II. This improves on the original TRUFORM in that while the original was forced to use fixed "steps" in the level of tessellation applied TRUFORM II can now offer infinitely variable levels of tessellation as the need arises. To round off the vertex shader functions it also handles displacement mapping. Unlike bump mapping which only operates on a surface's normals (lighting direction information), displacement mapping actually modifies the surface itself based on information held in a displacement map.

The advantage to this is when an object is viewed in profile or as a silhouette. For example if we take a cylinder and apply a bump map to it to simulate a threaded portion, that screw thread will still appear to be a cylinder when you look at its silhouette while a displacement mapped screw thread would distort the cylinder to create an actual thread that even in silhouette looks right. It doesn't use any less polygons than actually mapping the surface from the word go, it's simply an easier way to do it. The same principle would apply so a tyre tread as in the example below.

The vertex shader 2.0 standard now adds flow control instruction to the increased 1024 instructions handling capability which means routines can be looped, conditionally jumped etc. leading to even greater flexibility. 128bit floating point pixel shader precision allows for greater colour fidelity and dynamic range for the pixel shaders but alas these lack the same flow control instructions. In real terms this means that not only can scenes potentially consist of more colours but also they can have a larger brightness range offering somber shadows and bright highlights in the same frame without sacrificing colour fidelity.

Memory bandwidth will be a major problem when using 128bit colour but the Radeon 9700 is ready to handle DDRII when it comes along so this should radically help. Of course a lot of the 9700's features are dependent on the arrival of DirectX 9 so let's just have a quick look at what it'll add.

 

The 9700 also supports a 256 bit memory architecture that, as you can see below is similar in its operation to the 128bit architecture introduced by NVIDIA. 256bit memory means more pins on the GPU, more difficulty in the design and more real estate needed for the core and packaging, particularly using the 0.15micron process as ATi are, but the benefits should be worthwhile.

And we can't mention the memory architecture without reference to the so far rather unexciting addition of an AGP8X interface. While this increases the bandwidth from 1 GB/sec (AGP 4X)to 2 GB/sec (AGP 8X) it's not currently being taken advantage of to any great extent and seems plagued with compatibility issues when used on the current batch of AGP 8X chipset motherboards, including our KT400 DFI board.

HyperZ III continues the ATi tradition for hidden surface removal and Z buffer efficiency. Frame and Z buffers are handled in blocks of 8x8 pixels and Z buffers are cleared per block rather than per pixel so decreasing the time taken to flush them (Fast Z Clear).

ATi's improved Z compression allows data within those 8x8 pixel blocks to be compressed at a ratio of ratio of between 2:1 up to 4:1 prior to being written to the Z buffer. This can increase to as much as 24:1 depending on AA mode used.

AntiAliasing on the Radeon 9700 now uses a much more efficient multi-sampling technique and improved sub-pixel sample pattern. This is combined with some clever Z buffer sampling and non-linear gamma correction to improve AA quality on a conventional CRT monitor. This in theory should offer just about the best AA quality on the market.

6x AA Sampling

ATi have once again innovated in the use of their video technology by handing off some of the video decoding functions to the pixel shader. This perfectly demonstrates the flexibility of the current generation of shaders. ATi have called this technology.....wait for it......VideoShader!

One of the big features they're touting on the video front is "FULLSTREAM", a technology designed to filter out some of the blockiness often found in low bandwidth video. It seems that that video application being used needs to be coded to take advantage of this technology and ATi expect support from REAL and other third party partners in the near future. It seems a little odd that the feature can't be implemented at the driver stage but without knowing more about the steps involved there's know way of knowing if this would be feasible.

Finally on the display side the 9700 PRO features dual 400MHz RAMDACs which can be configured for dual outputs using ATi's proprietary HydraVision software. There's also an onboard 165 MHz TDMS transmitter for digital display output. ATi make an impression by now offering 10bit colour precision as opposed to the 8bit precision we've become used to. This in theory should offer a much greater range of colours and transitions. In theory while 8bit colour offers 256 shades of red, green and blue or a total of 256x256x256 = 16.78 million colour variations, 10bit offers 1024 shades of red, green and blue or 1024x1024x1024 = 10.74 billion colours. Not something LCD monitor users are going to benefit a great deal from but it should bring some nice improvements on CRT monitors.

Okay, that's a pretty basic look at what the 9700 has on offer, let's take a look at the graphics card in question :

<<< Back to Review Index | Page 2 A look at the Card >>>

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