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."

Comments

This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[pnatural]

...until John Carmack responds with his take on the card.

I'm serious. How many of us base our video card purchases on the recommendations he makes? He knows the cards in detail, knows what features they support and how well, and he sure as hell knows how well they'll perform with the next id game.

So John, is this card worthy?

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[cwebster]

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

Re:And why???

[Schnapple]

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.

I already have a 9700

[Critical_]

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?

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

Is there any such thing as 3D acceleration for Radeon cards in Linux?

Ummm... Yes. There are open source drivers for anything lower than the Radeon 8500... There are open source drivers in development for the Radeon 8500, as well as closed source drivers from ATI for the FireGL cards (which, BTW, work with the Radeon 8500, and are much more stable, for me, than any version of the nVidia linux drivers).

In addition, there are 3rd party commercial drivers for the Radeon cards, too.

Oh, and let's not forget that if you want 3D acceleration for a new nVidia card under FreeBSD (for example), you're screwed. I've had no problems getting the DRI working on my Radeon 7500 under FreeBSD (and will be trying with an 8500 tonight).

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Clue4All]

And? ATi has dumped partial specs on XFree86 developers and said "here." 3D support for the Radeon series of cards is abysmal and non-existent for the 8500 and higher cards. 2D isn't that impressive either. If you want OpenGL form ATi, you can get it, though, with BINARY-ONLY DRIVERS. You're comparing this to high quality nVidia drivers from the start that get 95-99% of the Windows framerate? Gimme a break.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[morgajel]

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.