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ATi Radeon 9700 Full Release Review w/ Benchmarks

Posted by timothy on from the the-smell-of-expiring-NDAs dept.

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."

6 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. HardOCP too... by Marasmus · · Score: 4, Informative

    [H]ardOCP Also has a review and benchmarks. Good stuff from the [H]ard crew.

    --
    .... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
  2. Re:And why??? by Schnapple · · Score: 5, Informative
    Are we still using QuakeIII as a benchmark?
    Well, several reasons:
    1. Quake 3 has been out for some time so you can follow the progress of this card in reference to other cards, even ones in the distant past (1999).
    2. The Quake 3 engine has improved quite a bit, especially in more recent games like Jedi Knight II and Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
    3. Quake 3 has proven quite stable and popular and powers a lot of games.
    4. ATI just got done with QuakeCon, so they're obviously big fans of id.
    5. The 9700 powers DOOM III pretty good (just got done seeing it this weekend at QuakeCon) and so it makes sense to see how well it will do with id's current engine before wondering what it will do with the next one.
    6. Most importantly, everyone uses Quake 3 to benchmark.
    --

    Schnapple

  3. I already have a 9700 by Critical_ · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  4. Re:I gave up ATI. by D3 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  5. Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... by cwebster · · Score: 5, Informative

    the doom3 demo theater at quakecon was run by a box with a radeon 9700, so that should answer your question.

  6. Here is what John sais by toofast · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."