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Radeon 9700 Pro: ATI Ahead
Keefe writes "The epic battle between ATI and Nvidia wages on. While Nvidia awaits arrival of their near-fabled NV30 for redemption, ATI conquers all by introducing the fastest and most advanced graphics card to date. The next-generation ATI Radeon 9700 Pro marks the second time Nvidia cedes the performance crown to ATI (the first time being the brief glory when the ATI Rage Fury beat the Nvidia TNT). See how the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro stacks up at Techware Labs."
PC Gamer reviewed the 9700 four months ago.
???
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I wonder how much extra circuitry this chip has in order to be backwards compatible. I rember reading that the Geforce 3 had to have some legacy circuitry that wasn't used in Direct Draw 8 games in order to run Direct Draw 7 games. Now that we're into DD8.1 and DD9.0, how much more legacy circuitry is in there?
... it wants its news back.
First they point out a Salon piece mentioning "selling out" and now we get an ATi puff piece for a video card taht has been out for months...
If only I had a brain, I could figure out what this meant!!
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3-500 dollars today for a card that will be severely outclassed by a card in a few months. There are no new games that demand a card this instant. I personally plan on buying a new computer and geforce fx when doom3 comes out. Unless you have to buy a new system in the next 3 months why not wait?
The internet is on computers these days.
I think the point the author is trying to make is that the card has been out for months, and Nvidia STILL hasn't released their next big thing. Look what happened to 3dfx when they where slow out of the gate with next gen cards.
Being faster means little when you have no modern competition. If the current ATI's remain in the lead performance wise when the next Nvidia chipset is released, that will be a major victory for ATI. On the other hand, ATI does have the crown at the moment, and the longer they are in the lead the more market share they could take from NVidia. Then back to the first hand, a whole lot of people aren't ready to upgrade yet and may not be for a while, so being in the lead when nobody is buying isn't really an advantage after all. On the other hand once again... oh, nevermind.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Hmmm
Nvidia GeForce4 TI : approx $100
ATI 9700 : around $300
Games or software that need 9700 over GeForce4 : 0
Maybe I'll wait until the cost comes down and until there is a true need for that card
9700
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
nVidia has convinced me with their FreeBSD drivers. Good work.
is not that this is the second time that ATI has been faster than nVidia, it's that this is only the second time that this has been the case.
Back in The Day, it seemed that 3dfx would come out with their card, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then someone else would release theirs, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then 3dfx would release their next generation of cards, and the cycle would continue that way.
It's been all ATI and nVidia now for a number of years, and ATI has only just now figured out that if they want to sell graphics cards to gamers, they have to be faster every once in a while?
I hope it reverts to the old model. Competition can only yield better graphics cards at lower prices.
The NV30 will be a better value than you think. Not only will it replace your old video card, but it'll replace your old hair dryer, too!
-Teckla
Man I just upgraded to a Riva TNT2... Does this mean I have to upgrade AGAIN???
"No Matter Where You Go.. There You Are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
Wasn't this card released a few months ago? About two days after I bought my GeForce 4 Ti4600 :-(
But having seen the videos for the Nvidea Fx card I can't see ATI holding the crown for long.
The Radeon 8500 outperformed the Geforce3 Ti500 and came out months before the Geforce4 Ti series. They're continually trading the performance lead. The only instance of nVidia ever keeping the performance crown continuously from one product generation to another was Geforce2-->Geforce3.
From the time the Geforce2 came out until the Radeon 8500 came out 17 months ago, ATI had the unquestionable performance crown, but since then it has been juggling back and forth, which is to be expected since each new product release is about 6 months after the competitor's last release and the technology improves as time goes on. nVidia has a habit of shooting for a holiday release but not actually shipping until the new year, and ATI has made their last two releases in August. So when either one of them makes a new release they have a 6-month lead over the other company's product, so you should expect them to always trade performance crowns unless one of them is more than 6 months begind the other in R&D, which would be saying quite a lot.
Repeal the DMCA!
Last time I checked, NVidia had an obnoxious policy of not releasing technical info for all the functionality of their cards. Is that still the case?
How is ATI regarding open source support? Can I run a fully powered video card from ATI without having to download special drivers directly from ATI, like I used to have to do with NVidia?
do a search...yes this problem was fixed by ati.
grab the latest drivers...it was just a glitch in the first release.
or you could always flash the bios of your OEM card with the firmware from a retail card..
The only difference is 1/2 the memory bandwidth. While that may seem like a lot, the 9500 pro actually gives @ 70% of the performance of the 9700 Pro.
and....
The 9700 Pro, 9700, and the 9500 Pro use the exact same GPU. So download a new bios at www.3dchipset.com/temp/warp11.zip and you can overclock the GPU to get almost 90% of the performance of a 9700 Pro.
Read all about it here Firingsquad.com
Also make sure to get DirectX 9
and New Catalyst 3.0 Drivers
And the 9500 Pro is a cheap at $180 delivered.
www.pricewatch.com
Maybe this article about ATI's Radeon 9500Pro would have been a better one to link to. It shows how this cheaper R300 based product compares to other offerings and how it beats the Ti4200 hands down and often outdoes the Ti4600. It may not be the killer card that the 9700 is, and may not be a true entry level card, but for the mainstream gamer market it gives mighty fine performance for your cash.
I know I'm going to get blasted for being a Luddite, but try to read more into this than a rehash of "640K is more than anyone will ever need." Please?
First, PC video has gotten very fragmented in terms of capability. Hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) first appeared in the GeForce 1 several years ago. The follow up, the GeForce 2 became a very popular, almost standard, card. But there are still major PC retailers that ship with motherboard video, such as Intel's extreme-whatsit and so on. These chipsets are not T&L capable. Still, several years after the first T&L cards appeared, there is a huge segment of the market that doesn't have hardware T&L. These are fast machines in every other respect (bottom end these days is 1.8GHz), just not T&L accelerated 3D.
Of course the hot video feature these days is programmable shader logic. But realistically what percentage of very capable PCs support this? 10%?
Second, the bottom has fallen out of 3D gaming on the PC. The sales figures of games that are perceived as Big Hits, like No One Lives Forever 2, are, in reality, abysmal. We're talking under 50,000 copies. There are some 3D games that are doing well, but it's a small, small handful. Just that "Oh yeah, what about Doom 3?" comes up in these discussions shows how weak the market is.
My point is that video cards keep improving, but at the same time, there's no market for these features, nor is there a market for the features of cards two generations back. I don't like this, but that doesn't change anything. Certainly it's fun to write shaders and to be able to buy something for $400 that's significantly better than $100,000 hardware from just a few years ago, but that's looking at the situtation from a "look at what I have in MY computer" perspective, not something I can realistically expect to be in most of the PCs out there.
have a Windows box around "just for gaming." Yet we lambast Microsoft regularly on Slashdot and to our friends? Seriously, if you want people to switch, how about only buying games that run on Linux or other Open Source OSs'? All I play is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III, and Unreal Tounament 2003 which run great on Debian Testing (my Redhat 8 laptop is another matter-HELP!). Is gaming that important that you have to run a Windows box and buy Windows-only games? A little monetary support to the manufacturers who help us could go a long way. Gaming could be the "killer app" for a lots of would be Open Source converts.
This guy is way out there
ATI is in REALLY good shape right now. As far as their drivers go, they're really getting much better. ATI will have had the performance crown for 6 months or so by the time the FX comes out, by that time they'll have a card based on the R350 core that should at least equal the FX, and come June or July the completely new R400 core based cards should be around, more than likely beating Nvidia's next big thing by a long time. Nvidia is a hype machine, but they're not delivering, they dropped the ball big time by not getting the FX out at least by Christmas. And I bet if you took the dustbuster off the top of the FX and ran in at clock speeds that normal cooling can facilitate it would be on par with the 9700. And top performance means nothing anyway, it's what, like less that 5% of the market? ATI currently has the fastest mobile chipset, pocket chipset, value chipset, and their mainboard chipset is for the P4, not the Athlon like Nvidia, who do you think is in a better market position? They've basically got Nividia beat everywhere right now (as far as stuff already on the market goes) they seem pretty serious about being the one to beat themselves.
With all due respect to the submitter of this news article, I have to question the statement that the Rage Pro beat the TNT.
As I recall the days when Quake 3 was getting ready to be released, the id guys specifically said that they were trying to really hard to make Q3 work on the ATI Rage Pro, and the way they were going about making it work was allowing the user to turn off enough eye candy (ie remove enough features) so that the game would be compatible with the Rage Pro. The end result was that it looked rather ugly. On the other hand, as far as I know, the TNT1, although probably too slow to play Q3 feasibly, could support full eye candy, including 32-bit color.
I actually played the game on a TNT2 for a while, which, I believe, had the same features as the TNT1 with a speed boost.
Now if you are talking about quake1 benchmarks or something, I don't know which card would've been faster (rage pro or tnt1) but let's face it, there's more to video cards than just high framerates, as 3dfx found out (the hard way).
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Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
ATi only ships binary drivers, and they are rather buggy so far.
Bullshit.
The Radeon drivers are as open as ATI could make them -- all the functions they had to keep closed for whatever pointy-haired reason are exported into a static lib, so that all the rest could be open-sourced. Want to compile them against a custom kernel such as Gentoo's? Sure, you can, the drivers are designed so that this is absolutely possible.
As for buggy, I own a 3rd party card built around an ATI chip, the worst-case scenario, and I would sincerely like to know what you mean by 'rather buggy'. Outside pure FUD, of course.
So cut them some slack. You like your nVidia card, it's cool, I'm happy for you. But if you don't reward companies that get out of their way to provide us minority Linux folks with good drivers, like ATI did, then you provide strictly no incentive for those companies to support us. So let's drop the dick^W GPU contest and stop peeing in the soup, hmm? Thank you.
Rant over.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
If you're talking about current games that use DirectX 8.1 the GeForce Ti4200 (sorry, the Ti4400 is out of production) is still a reasonable choice.
However, you are going to see games that use the full DirectX 9.0 functionality over the next 12 months. That unfortunately means the GeForce4 Ti4xxx series cards are going to start bogging down on highly-complex backgrounds and 3-D effects from these new games. You'll want a card that support DX9 functionality in hardware like the ones that use the ATI R300 chipset (Radeon 9500 and above) and the ones that use the new nVidia GeForce FX chipset.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Two weeks ago, I bought a Radeon 9700 Pro. In that time, I have managed to get three out of my huge pile of 3D games to work with it, and only Quake III works well. ATIs driver coders are off in lala-land, and games can't cope with them. No two people seem to have the same problems with the Radeon 9700 Pro, which makes troubleshooting a nightmare. I would have been better off just getting an Nvidia card for half the money to hold me over until the next Nivida card came out.
ATI cards are just not good for gamers. While Nvidia focuses on speed and stability, ATI focuses on cramming any possible feature they can into their All-In-Wonder cards, at the cost of a decent driver set for people who want a card that just attaches to a CRT and WORKS. I will NEVER buy another ATI card, and I will always remember why I ran all my systems on Nvidia for five years before screwing up and getting this fucking ATI card.
You can wait for the day when there isn't a new piece of hardware on the way that'll toast your current kit, but then you just wait forever.
I actually bought a 9700 Pro just the other day, to go in a new PC. All the parts for that PC were custom chosen, a few to have a good price-performance ratio (e.g., only an Athlon XP 2100+) and a few because they're the best around and I don't expect to upgrade them any time soon (the 9700 Pro).
I've been watching the market for several months now, and AFAICS the 9700 Pro I bought is way cheaper than it was those few months ago when it came out, and is likely to be way cheaper than anything new by nVidia initially will be, if and when that comes out. The performance of the 9700 Pro is still way ahead of everything else currently available, so buying a new PC now, with games very much in mind, what would you have done? Saved a whole 25% and bought a Geforce 4 Ti4600 instead?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I've had the opposite experience since September when I replaced the GF4 Ti4600 I had (moved it to the wife's machine at home) with a 9700 Pro. I have found the drivers terrific so far, from the included version on the CD up to the current 3.0 DX9-compliant Catalysts. What's more, I've tested the card with more than 35 3D games in my library--closer to 40--and have yet to find one that wouldn't run, or either ran so poorly the game was unplayable. From my point of view it's simply the best 3D card I've ever owned--especially for 3D gaming.
Also, this is the second motherboard I've used the card with--the first was an MSI KT333 chipset board, my current board is a nVidia-based nForce2 chipset board manufactured by Chaintech, which supports AGP x8 and several other things. The card runs extremely well. I've not even been tempted to swap cards with the wife and go back to the nVidia Ti4600 product--no way...
I would strongly suggest that either you have some underlying system incompatiblity of which you are unaware which prohibits the card from working properly--or else you simply had the bad luck to pick up a defective card (in which case an RMA is order.) Your experience is certainly not representative of that of the reviewer of the article on which this thread is based, none of the other reviews of the product (and there have been dozens of them), or my direct personal experience. Think how you like but I thought you should know your experience is anything but typical.