Slashdot Mirror


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."

9 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Direct X 9 ? by Camulus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well there are some floating around, but from what I hear it shouldn't be out till the end of August. I got to play on one of these cards at QuakeCon and let me tell you they are SWEET. Wolfenstien in 1280x1024, lightmap, all eye candy was usually 250-330 FPS. When it hit 400 FPS I about dropped a load.

  2. Re:I gave up ATI. by hendridm · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I gaurentee you're using an Athlon system. My last (and I mean last) Athlon system didn't work with any of the ATI boards. I thought ATI was shite, so I bought an nVidia board. When my Athlon decided to cook itself (taking my board with onboard RAID with it, a mistake I will not make again), I decided no more - I bought a P4 system. All of the cards the previously wouldn't work in my computer now worked flawlessly, including:

    - ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon
    - ATI TV Tuner
    - Hauppage TV Tuner

    Granted, it might be partly AMD's fault, but I shouldn't have to worry about compatibility, and with Intel I don't have to. I didn't want to use nVidia because they don't have an acceptable alternative to the All-in-Wonder series.

  3. Re:Direct X 9 ? by bleckywelcky · · Score: 3, Interesting


    Wolfenstien in 1280x1024, lightmap, all eye candy was usually 250-330 FPS. When it hit 400 FPS I about dropped a load.

    LMAO!!

    Other than being glad that the architecture is advanced enough to achieve such numbers, why would you be astounded at this? I mean, its only another ~100 FPS that you only notice because you can see the actual FPS numbers, not because the quality is any better. See, I was astounded when I dumped my old TNT2 for a Radeon 7500 a month or two ago and I could actually walk through a fire fight (in any game) without the FPS dropping into the single digits (5 FPS TFC is not fun). I was astounded at that, but still not load-droppingly-astounded :P

    Having said that, I still can't get extremely high resolutions with all the extras on to work absolutely great on my 7500, although $57 for a 64 MB DDR 7500 back in May was not that bad :) I would love to see some of the newer games runnings at 1600 x 1200 with everything on and going at 80+ FPS.

  4. Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... by mypalmike · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In gamespy's coverage of quakecon, Carmack says Doom3 will be, "believe it or not, based around the technology that became available with GeForce1-level hardware." (That's a quote from the article writer, not Carmack himself.) But if you buy the new ATI card, you'll see its advanced technology put to good use in 2-3 years.

    --
    There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
  5. Re:I gave up ATI. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    My Athlon XP 1600 has been working perfectly with my Radeon 7500 and all of my other hardware for the past 9 months or so. Maybe you just had a shitty motherboard?

  6. ATI's history by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    ATI's history with 2D graphics cards actually doesn't have much to do with what they're up to now. Every 3D card since the Radeon has actually been designed by the former SGI employees who worked on the N64. They left SGI to form ArtX, which then was bought out by (or merged?) with ATI.

    That's interesting, cause nVidia is pretty well staffed with ex-SGI engineers too. It reminds me of how the early US and Russian space programs were actually developed by former German rocket scientists. ("Our Germans are better than their Germans")

    So are ATI's ex-SGIers are better than nVidia's ex-SGIers?

  7. Re:Kudos to ATI by morgajel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    bullshit- absolute and utter bullshit. I for the longest time, was an ATI supporter. They have by far, the most kickass integrated tv-tuner cards I've seen.
    I supported them when everyone else laughed at me. I supported them- until I bought neverwinter nights last weekend. They have NO DRIVER SUPPORT. they're response to 'your card won't work and continues to crash' was 'suck our balls. if you want to play, you have to use the 2-versions-past drivers.' Don't believe me? look up the all-in-wonder-radeon drivers on their site and look at the known issues section. That isn't acceptable to me.
    I bought a geforce4 mx440 yesterday, and it works great. First non-ati card I've bought. I hear that each time nvidia releases new detonator drivers, it improves ALL of their cards, including the older ones. so yeah, I felt the need to rant on that.

    mod me down if it gives you your jollies, but just keep in mind your supporting a company that doesn't support you.

    --
    Looking for Book Reviews? Check out Literary Escapism.
  8. Re:Direct X 9 ? by X-Guy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    NVIDIA's binary drivers don't break between XFree86 versions. They support all XFree86 versions from 4.0.1 through top of tree XFree86 CVS. And they do have open source versions of the 2D-only drivers. The open source drivers support all NVIDIA cards. I've seen more complaints on XFree86 mailing lists about newer ATI cards not working that there are about new NVIDIA cards not working. I'd take vendor support over specs any day.

  9. Is it just a fast Rage 128? by Wolfier · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It was the last time I saw Linux Radeon drivers.

    Apparently if you have a really fast Rage 128 games like Q3 will run fast. But who needs a fast Rage 128...we need drivers that treat an N-generation card as such, not an (N-1) generation card.

    So my true questions are: do the _current_ drivers support

    1. hardware T&L?
    2. vertex shaders?
    3. pixel shaders?
    4. FSAA / SmoothVision?

    and last but not least,
    5. TV-out / Multiple monitor / Video-in?