As games get more advanced and technologies change, the hardware industry tries its best to stay ahead of what the creative minds of the game writers have in store. With the Radeon 9700 Pro they achieved what they were looking for at the time. A fully DX9 compliant card with enough grunt to handle Doom III. Things however never stop. We now have the Radeon 9800 and Radeon 9800 Pro. The Radeon 9800 (R350) is essentially an updated Radeon 9700. That doesn't mean to say its as simple as a speed hike. Some refinements and technological advancements have been made. Changes have been made to SmartShader, Smoothvision and Hyper Z III.

The Radeon 9700 had SmartShader 2.0, Smoothvision 2.0 and Hyper Z III. The Radeon 9800 has updated these parts to call then SmartShader 2.1, Smoothvision 2.1 and Hyper Z III+.

Just by looking and what the new technologies have been called, you can see that it is an update or refinement in technology rather than a complete new level. Never the less the Radeon 9800 is an improved card. Lets have a look at how the speed specs pan out against the Radeon 9700 Pro

Card Specs

Chipset details

Smartshader 2.1

1. DX9 2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass

2. DX9 2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control

3. F-buffer support for increased Shader instruction lengths

4. Multiple Render Target (MRT) support

5. Shadow volume rendering acceleration

6. 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point colour output formats

Smoothvision 2.1

1. 2x / 4x / 6x full scene multi-sampling anti-aliasing modes with programmable sample patterns

2. 2x / 4x / 8x / 16x anisotropic filtering modes with performance (bi-linear) and quality (tri-linear) options

Hyper Z III+

1. 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test

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

3. Fast Z-Buffer Clear

4. Z cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

Truform 2.0

1. 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support

2. Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon

3. Displacement mapping

Videoshader

1. Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video

2. FULLSTREAM video de-blocking technology

3. Noise removal filtering for captured video

4. MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and colour space conversion

5. All-format DTV/HDTV decoding

6. YPrPb component output

7. Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion

8 Speed AGP

The Radeon 9800 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. New motherboards are supporting 8X AGP

256-Bit Memory Controller

The Radeon 9800 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 is still undecided when the Radeon will start to ship with this memory.

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F-Buffer, SmartShader 2.1, Smoothvision 2.1, HyperZ III+

Useful Links

 

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