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ATi Radeon 9700 Full Release Review w/ Benchmarks
Chalupa_Man writes: "ATi Technologies has officially released their new Radeon 9700 Pro today.
Real benchmark numbers and a full review can be found here. The card is
impressive for sure and should have NVIDIA on the ropes for a while, as it beats
out a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 handily, especially with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic
Filtering enabled. Image quality is also top notch for this new high end DX9 compliant
product from ATi." sunny_talwar adds these links to more reviews of the new high-end Radeon at AnandTech's and Tom's Hardware. Update: 08/20 03:06 GMT by T : Cp writes "Gamers Depot also has their full review up of the Radeon 9700 Pro, including nice images of the driver tabs and 6x Antialiasing performance."
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One part of it is that it's something people are accustomed to seeing, so a score of X is more meaningful to them than one from some game without any sense of reference. People also still play Q3 a fair bit, with baseq3, Urban Terror, Reaction Quake 3, and so on all being played.
As well, when video cards come out every six months, and games like the Quake series every year or more, you're going to see the same game used for a while.
Once Doom 3, Unreal 2k3, eetc. come out. maybe those will be added to benchmarks.. Who knows.
[H]ardOCP Also has a review and benchmarks. Good stuff from the [H]ard crew.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Compared to some other companies *cough*NVIDIA*cough* ATI has been very helpful to linux developers. While NVIDIA only releases binaries, and only for x86, ATI actually provides developers with technical specs to aid development on other platforms (PowerPC anyone?).
From ATI's website:
While ATI does not develop Linux or XFree86 drivers for its graphics cards in house, we actively support 3rd party developers that provide driver support for the majority of ATI products with development kits and information.
Radeon drivers for Linux are in development. XFree86 and the DRI Open Source Project offer Radeon 2D support with their latest released source code. 3D support is scheduled to be released Q1 2001.
Schnapple
Yeah that's pretty amazing considering anything over about 70FPS is more or less completely pointless to the user.
Quote:
When ATI started talking about R300 and hinted that it would be significantly faster than anything NVIDIA had up their sleeves, we were understandably skeptical. The progression from there is best summed up by what our own Matthew Witheiler had to say about the R300: "It all started with Carmack's endorsement of the card; that was huge for them. Now it has erupted into something that I didn't think was possible"
Matthew's final statement sums up the feelings all of us at AnandTech had about the R300; we were impressed that John Carmack provided such a glowing endorsement of the technology back at Quakecon, but we were floored once we actually saw working silicon in action.
>Maybe they had a 9500 but decided to tweak it a little more but not to the point where it was a 10000.
The 9500 will be released in a couple of months (as in mentioned in the Tom's Hardware Guide article). It will be a scaled down 9700. It should have a lower clock speed and fewer texture units.
Its a demo/test model that I was using in the lab to verify compatibility with our applications. Yes, that is corporate speak for "I played quake for a couple hours on company time". I am payed to do that. Anyway, here it goes...
* 2D: WOW! I have been a diehard Matrox fan because of the awesome 2D on their boards. However, I think Matrox might have a challenger on their hands. Even at dizzyingly high resolutions, the fonts were crisp and clean.
* 3D: Very nice. It has been image quality than the Geforce Ti's with FSAA enabled. However, it cannot compete with the Matrox Parhelia here. The Parhelia, though it has slower framerates, has better color saturation and 16x FSAA w/o a massive performance hit.
* Drivers: so far it was worked fine under WinXP. I got the SVGA xserver running on it after mucking around with Redhat for a couple hours. I am hoping a dedicated XServer is coming out for this card since it needs one badly.
Anyone else have any luck under Linux?
Digit 1 - DirectX version
Digit 2 - Performance relative to others in the same series
Digits 3 and 4 - meaningless
What would Lemmy do?
I gave up ATI after my eXpert@play board. I bought the board, installed it and the RAM was bad. Called ATI tech support IN CANADA!!! No 1-800 number! At first they wanted me to spend my own money to send them the bad card and get a new one. I said, "If I have to spend my own money the card goes back to the place I bought it and I buy 3Dfx." So ATI sends me a card and a UPS shipping label. I still spent $20 to call in the first place!
Next, I found out that the benchmarks I had looked at so long were for a tweaked set of drivers that ATI had released to get better scores on Quake and the card sucked for anything else and wasn't as good for Quake as I thought! This was one week after I'd bought the card.
I'll NEVER trust them again.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
the doom3 demo theater at quakecon was run by a box with a radeon 9700, so that should answer your question.
From ati's website:
John Carmack
"The R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine, it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations"
"3D accelerators are all about performance, quality and flexibility and the R300 breaks new ground over anything thats come before it in all three areas."