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ATI Radeon 9700 Dissected

Posted by michael on from the stay-alert-and-keep-your-soldering-iron-handy dept.

Bender writes "The guys who laid out the future of real-time graphics a while back have now dissected ATI's Radeon 9700 chip. Their analysis breaks down performance into multiple components--fill rate, occlusion detection, pixel shaders, vertex shaders, antialiasing--and tests each one synthetically before moving on to the usual application tests like SPECviewperf and UT 2003. You can see exactly how this chip advances the state of the art in graphics, piece by piece. Interesting stuff."

9 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. 110 million transistors of joy by StArSkY · · Score: 2, Interesting

    What a quote on page 16. "110 million transistors of joy".

    My power Supply struggles with the Radeon 8500. I am going to have to upgrade before i get one of these babies. Running Dual LCD's, the Radeon's are the only real option.

    I have to hand it to ATI, they have absolutely wholloped the rest of the market getting this baby out before Christmas.

    --
    lounge around on the blue couch
  2. Enthusiasm for procedural shaders by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    There seems to be considerable enthusiasm for procedural shaders amongst graphics card designers. This is not necessarily shared by animators.

    It's partly a working style issue. Texture-map people go out with cameras and photograph nice-looking surfaces, which they then apply to models. Or they paint the textures. Procedural shader people try to code up the "meaning" of a texture. Texture maps are created by artists; procedural shaders are created by programmers.

    The basic problem with texture maps, of course, is that you can't get too close before the texture gets blurry and the illusion breaks down. In film work, you know where the camera is, so you can figure out how much texture detail you need. Games don't have that luxury; you can get close to a surface and blow the illusion.

    Most film work other than Pixar's has used texture maps. There are exceptions, but they're typically for hair, fur, and water, where the problem is motion.

    The price you pay for using procedural shaders is that they usually model surface, not detail. So you have to model the detail. Lots of it. Again, Pixar is notorious for this. ("We modelled the threads on the screws, even though you couldn't see them!")

    Texture maps, bump maps, and displacement maps can be used to modulate procedural shaders, and that's probably how surface detail will be done, rather than getting carried away with building complex textures in some programming language.

    1. Re:Enthusiasm for procedural shaders by Sunnan · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Texture maps are created by artists; procedural shaders are created by programmers.


      Procedural shaders is as much 'art' as texture maps.

      Speaking with an 'artsy' analogy, using texture maps is akin to doing a rough sculpture and painting patterns on it to make it look more real, while using procedural shaders is like doing a very detailed sculpture. How can you say that modelling the threads on the screws is 'less art'?

      Texture maps, bump maps, and displacement maps can be used to modulate procedural shaders,


      This I agree with, though. In the short term, bump & displacement maps is a fast way to beauty.

      But maybe it'll become easier for artists to use procedural shaders in the future, and there might be more ready-made objects available.
  3. I may be asking too much here... by JabberWokky · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Are there any 2d/extras reviews of the modern crop of cards? I don't play games whatsoever, especially 3d games, but I like a nice video system that can handle three or more monitors at high resolution with a high res wallpaper.

    Now, if you can provide that, let me throw a twist that makes me think nobody has done it - I've run 100% Linux for several years. Is there a site that reviews video cards plus all the extras (like TV-in and out) with an eye toward their Linux compatable features? I have a G400 and ATI All in Wonder Pro and can do TV-in (but not record video) and TV-out (although I lose a monitor and have to swap cables makes that a PITA).

    For that matter, I'd like to do video editing at some point in the future (when I get a digital camcorder). I'd like to convert all my VHS tapes to a digital format. Anybody know of a good import card at a reasonable price (under that $5k prosumer/low end professional bracket)? If it doesn't pull the absolute *best* quality possible from the VHS format, I'm content to wait rather than reencode a couple years from now.

    I kick this question out to Slashdot every year or so. To those with experience: what's the latest?

    --
    Evan (no reference)

    --
    "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  4. Catch up nVidia .... by walkunder · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Build their own Xfree86 driver enables all the features of their own card under none-ms systems , and don't expect the 3rd party will do them this favor ..... being a friendly and good company

  5. ATI isn't even on the chart. by Nailer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Every NVIDIA card since the GeForce2 Ultra has had Linux drivers before they even hit the shelves. This is because Nvidia pay people to write and maintain the drivers. They might not have specs, but at least NVidia support your choice of operating system.

    ATI release some specs, and that's all. They don't either bother writing drivers for their cards and they just hope someone else will - *maybe the weather channel, maybe soon, maybe later, maybe not for your specific card) or release binary-only drivers (great, at least they exist) that don't have anything like the performance of their Windows drivers. The UT2003 benchmark, if ran under Linux, won't even start on a Radeon 8500 (which ATI do have fast, binary only drivers for because its missing correct support for S3 texture compression. Which isn't exactly a new technology by any means.

    So I can get Open Source 2D support for a Radeon 9700? Great. I'm sure 2D support is why people buy a Radeon 9700.

    Vote with your dollars.

  6. Experience with two monitors on one of these? by rimmon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right now I'm using a Matrox G550 with two CRTs and I nothing but problems: When using video editing software (Avid ExpressDV, Premiere, Final Cut, you name it) with more then 16 bit colours the mouse disappears on the primary display. When i try to use software with some kind of fullscreen mode, like media players, acdsee, the computer reboots... I really loved my G550 with one Display. But (for me, YMMV) it just plain sucks with two displays... Anybody using the 9700 with two monitors with different resolutions (1600*1200, 1280*1024, with win2k) and can tell about his or her experiences?

  7. Gentoo and ATI - IMPORTANT! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Epic Games' much-anticipated Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo is now available on a self-booting Gentoo Linux-based LiveCD, allowing you to play the Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo using any modern PC with an NVIDIA GeForce 2 or greater graphics card and a CD-ROM drive. Full networking, OSS sound and Creative Soundblaster Live! and Audigy support included, allowing for the full gaming experience including LAN/Internet play, EAX environmental audio and of course 3D accelerated OpenGL graphics. The CD also serves as a fully-functional Gentoo Linux installation CD. Go grab it here!

  8. Patents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting


    I believe SGI sold most (all?) of their OpenGL patents to Microsoft some time ago...