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.

Introduction

Was it not good enough to have a Geforce 4 Ti 4600. Were you not satisfied with its speed, its triple figure hi-res fps in Quake III. Was the visual quality not good enough for you either. Well you are a hard person to satisfy then aren't you. Fortunately ATI have surpassed the Nvidia flagship once again. The to and fro world of the Graphics card business has started again with the Radeon 9700. Once again this card is not only a lot faster than its predecessor but it is very technologically advanced as well. This article will have a look at the specs of the card and try and explain a few of the main new features that this new card has to offer.

Card Specs

Chipset details

• Eight parallel rendering pipelines

• Four parallel geometry engines

• 256-bit DDR memory interface

• AGP 8X support

• SMARTSHADER™ 2.0

  • Programmable pixel and vertex shaders

  • 16 textures per pass

  • Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision

  • Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control

  • Multiple render target support

  • Shadow volume rendering acceleration

  • High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support

  • Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL

• SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0

  • 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes

    • Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns

  • 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes

    • Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options

• HYPER Z™ III

  • 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test

  • Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)

  • Fast Z-Buffer Clear

• TRUFORM™ 2.0

  • 2^nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support

  • Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon

  • Displacement mapping

• VIDEOSHADER™

  • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video

  • FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology

  • Noise removal filtering for captured video

• MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion

• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding

• YPrPb component output

• Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion

• Dual integrated display controllers

• Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs

• Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI & HDCP compliant)

• Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution

• Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!

• PC 2002 compliant

8 Speed AGP

The Radeon 9700 will have full support for 8x AGP. Offering twice the bandwidth of the 4x cards. AGP 4x has a 32-bit wide bus and works at 33MHz, while AGP 8x is still 32-bit wide but works at 66MHz giving double the bandwidth at approximately 2GB/sec. Present day NVIDIA GeForce4 graphics cards are all AGP 4x.

256-Bit Memory Controller

The Radeon 9700 comes with a high performance 256-bit memory controller which can allow anything up to 20Gb/s of memory bandwidth the controller contains 4 individual 64-bit channel which all write data to the memory buffer simultaneously or be reading simultaneously. For future proofing this card the memory controller is designed to work with the new DDR-II memory type which hasn't as yet been officially released.

Page 2

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