Contents
Introduction
Basic Card Specs - Against the Radeon 8500
Chipset details
8x AGP
256-Bit Memory
Controller
Vertex Shaders
8 Rendering
Pipelines
Hyper Z III
SmoothVision 2.0
The Panther Says
- What we think of the card
Product specs -
A table of the most useful specifications
Useful Links -
Drivers, FAQ, Forum, price comparisons and links to buy.
Vertex Shaders
We can start
this little section by having a look at the new DirectX 9 specification
which the Radeon 9700 was designed for.
|
Features |
DirectX 8.0
|
DirectX 8.1
|
DirectX 9.0
|
|
Pixel Shaders |
1.1
|
1.4
|
2.0
|
|
Texture Maps |
4
|
6
|
16
|
|
Max Texture Instructions |
4
|
8
|
32
|
|
Max Colour Instructions |
8
|
8
|
8
|
|
Data Type |
Integer
|
Integer
|
Floating Point
|
|
Data Precision |
32 bits
|
48 bits
|
128 bits
|
|
Vertex Shaders |
1.1
|
1.1
|
2.0
|
|
Max Instructions |
128
|
128
|
1024
|
|
Max Constants |
96
|
96
|
256
|
|
Flow Control |
No
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Higher Order Surfaces |
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
N-Patches |
Yes
|
Yes
|
Yes
|
|
Continuous Tessellation |
No
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Adaptive Tessellation |
No
|
No
|
Yes
|
|
Displacement Mapping |
No
|
No
|
Yes
|
Looking at the
Vertex Shaders we can see that with DirectX 9 the max instructions are
no longer limited to 128 but now are 1024 per pass. Improved flow
control allows for jumps, loops and sub-routines in the instructions.
The Radeon 9700 comes with 4 programmable vertex shaders capable of
processing 300 Million triangles/s.
8 Rendering Pipelines
Double the
amount of pipelines of any other card on the market at time of writing.
The Radeon's 8 Pipelines are not only double in quantity but they use
128-bit Floating point operations while the Geforce 4 uses 64-bit
Integer operations. Floating point operations are more precise than
Integer one are.
Hyper Z III
Hyper Z
Technology is ATI answer to saving memory bandwidth and increasing the
efficiency and performance of the Z Buffer. By deciding which pixels and
polygons need to be rendered and which don't vital memory bandwidth can
be saved. Features of the Hyper Z III are:
-
Hierarchical-Z – checks which pixels can be seen in
order to avoid rendering the unnecessary ones.
-
Early-Z – an addition to HyperZ II, which makes
sure that hidden pixel check is done on pixel level, increasing
process efficiency to 100%.
-
Z-Compression – compresses the data in Z-buffer,
saving memory bandwidth.
-
Fast Z-Clear – a method which quickly discharges
the Z buffer after the scene has been rendered, and prepares it for
the next scene.
SmoothVision 2.0
SmoothVision is
the part of the technology that is responsible for the FSAA and the
anisotropic filtering. The Radeon 9700 can perform FSAA up to 6x.
-
State-of-the-art full-scene anti-aliasing
-
New technology processes up to 15.6 billion
anti-aliased samples per second for unprecedented performance
-
Supports 2x, 4x, and 6x modes with programmable
sample patterns
-
Advanced anisotropic filtering
-
Supports up to 16 bilinear samples (in performance
mode) or trilinear samples (in quality mode) per pixel
-
2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
-
Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample
patterns
-
2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
-
Adaptive algorithm with bilinear (performance) and
trilinear (quality) options
-
Bandwidth-saving algorithm enables this feature
with minimal performance cost
Recently we added the Matrox
Parhelia-512 to the reviews here at PantherProducts. If you have
read that review you would see that the new Matrox card was designed for
everyone. It was a cracking mix of features of everyone. The Radeon 9700
you will find is a gamers card. Although ATI likes to go for image
quality, this time they have added to the quality with speed. This card
is an overkill for today's games, however if you are looking at Unreal
Tournament 2003 (released end of 2002) or similar games, then the Radeon
9700 complete with an install MS DirectX 9 will be the choice for many
users. There are certain benchmarks that show that the Radeon beats the
Geforce 4 hands down. 3DMark for example the Radeon scores around the
14,000 mark while the Geforce 4 Ti 4600 only hits 10,000 in standard
tests.
We say only 10,000 but that is a massive score still. It just shows how
powerful this new card is. To put things into perspective, my Athlon XP
1800+ and Geforce 2 MX (which I still use for many games) puts in at
just over 1000 3Dmark 2001 points. So there you have it. Raw power for
your machine, until the next card that is. :).
Product Specs.
| Type |
Info |
| Memory |
128Mb DDR RAM |
| Memory Clock speed |
300Mhz DDR 600Mhz |
| Clock speed |
325Mhz |
| Memory
Bandwidth |
19.4Gb/s |
| Rendering
capabilities |
400 million
polygons/s |
| Theoretical
Fill rate |
2,600 Mpixels/sec
|
|
Transform Rate |
325
Million Triangles/s |
| RAMDAC |
2x 400Mhz |
| Pixel
Pipelines |
8 |
| Texture
Units per pipeline |
1 |
|
Other |
Hyper Z III
Smoothvision 2.0
SmartShader 2.0
Truform 2.0
Video Shader |
Useful Links
|
Other Graphics card reviews.
Looking for the Geforce 4 ? Then
you should be looking at the Geforce 4 Ti range. The Ti range
offers more speed, more features and more quality. Not to mention
the whopping great 128Mb of DDR RAM on everyone of the Geforce 4
Ti range. Featuring twin vertex shaders Lightspeed memory
architecture II Accuview Anti-aliasing, NView and more.
Click here for more
information
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