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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."
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!!
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
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.
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.
Nvidia GeForce4 TI : approx $100
ATI 9700 : around $300
Games or software that need 9700 over GeForce4 : 0
Seeing that look on your friends' faces: Priceless.
There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's ATI.
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
"PC Gamer reviewed the 9700 four months ago."
No kidding, this is the most out of date story I've seen on slashdot. Next the'll be releasing
386 Released with a math CoProcessor
reviews explaining the performance difference between the 386SX and 386DX here
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
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!
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
386 Released with a math CoProcessor
reviews explaining the performance difference between the 386SX and 386DX here
Ehm.....
Actually the link between the math coprocessor and the SX/DX name is an 80486 thing.
80386SX (Singleword Xchange) had a 16bit bus and could be plugged into a 286 board.
80386DX (Doubleword Xchange) had a 32bit bus and needed a new motherboard design (but was way faster because of the wider data bus, and could directly address more memory)
When the 80486 was introduced, the SX/DX distinction remained, this time to indicate the presence of the built-in FPU.
Urban myth wants that 80486SX's were full-blown CPUs in which the FPU silicon had failed tests, or, later, was just disabled, even though perfectly working.
Even worse was the fact that the 80487 was actually a FULL CPU+FPU, and not just an FPU. Upon startup it would disable the main processor and do everything. What a waste of power....
I never knew if the Weitek 4167 did this too.
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
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.
> There are no new games that demand a card this instant.
Try these games at 1600x1200 @ 32-bit, and then tell me a new video card won't help.
- Battlefield 1942
- UT2K3
- Morrowind
Personally, if you just got a GeForce 3 or 4, then yeah, you won't see that much difference, except you'll be able to crank up the resolution with the newer cards. For people who have a GeForce 2 (and below) (like me), upgrading to a ATI 9700 Pro, or GeForcs FX *is* a big difference.
But you are correct -- Games requiring 64-bit and 128-bit framebuffers won't be out till next year (2004). I think that's the time to pick up the GeForce FX.
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.