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Gamers and
Enthusiasts always seem to be looking for their next major
upgrade. There's almost a quest for that one piece
of hardware that's going to give them bragging rights and
make their buddies green with envy. Every time a new
processor, chipset or video card is announced, someone,
somewhere begins to save their money in eager anticipation
of the product's eventual release. In March, when
ATi unveiled the 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro, they mentioned
a 256MB version of the card was also in the works.
The 128MB variant proved to be the "fastest" video card
available at the time of its release, so naturally
enthusiasts everywhere were excited by the prospect of a
Radeon 9800 Pro with double the amount of RAM. We're
sure some of them even set aside a few dollars for one of
these cards without really knowing what the official
specifications would be. What speed would the memory
be clocked at? And what type of memory would it be?
Would the core be running at the same speed as the
"standard" Radeon 9800 Pro? And how would the extra
memory affect performance? Questions like these were
posted in many forums and message boards across the web.
Well, we've finally got one of these cards in the lab and
will attempt to answer these, and many more questions for
you on the upcoming pages. So, without further
delay, we bring you the 256MB ATi Radeon 9800 Pro...
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Specifications & Features of the 256MB ATi
Radeon 9800 Pro |
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Yup, It's A Beast Alright! |
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RADEON? 9800 Visual Processing
Unit (VPU)
MEMORY CONFIGURATION
MB
of DDR 2 SDRAM - 350MHz DDR (Effective 700MHz)
3D
GRAPHICS FEATURES
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Eight parallel rendering pipelines
process up to 3.04 billion pixels per second
Four parallel geometry engines
process up to 380 million transformed and lit
polygons per second
High precision 10-bit per channel
frame buffer support
256-bit DDR memory interface
AGP 8X support
SMARTSHADER? 2.1
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Full support for Microsoft® DirectX®
9.0 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in
hardware
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2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16
textures per rendering pass
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2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex
programs with an unlimited number of instructions
and flow control
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128-bit per pixel floating point
color formats
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Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
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Shadow volume rendering acceleration
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Complete feature set also supported
in OpenGL via extensions
SMOOTHVISION? 2.1
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State-of-the-art full-scene
anti-aliasing
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New technology processes up to 18.2
billion anti-aliased samples per second for
unprecedented performance
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Supports 2x, 4x, and 6x modes with
programmable sample patterns
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Advanced anisotropic filtering
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Supports up to 16 bilinear samples
(in performance mode) or trilinear samples (in
quality mode) per pixel
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2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing
modes
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Adaptive algorithm with programmable
sample patterns
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2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering
modes
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Adaptive algorithm with bilinear
(performance) and trilinear (quality) options
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Bandwidth-saving algorithm enables
this feature with minimal performance cost
HYPER Z? III+
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Hierarchical Z-Buffer and Early Z
Test reduce overdraw by detecting and discarding
hidden pixels
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Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and
Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth
consumption by over 50%
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Fast Z-Buffer Clear
- 8.8 : 1 Compression Ratio
- Optimized Z-Cache for enhanced performance of
shadow volumes
TRUFORM? II
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2nd generation N-patch higher order
surface support
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Discrete and continuous tessellation
levels per polygon for dynamic LOD
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DirectX 9.0 displacement mapping
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VIDEOSHADER?
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Seamless integration of programmable
pixel shaders with video data
High quality, hardware accelerated
de-blocking of internet streaming video
Noise removal filter for captured
video
Integrated MPEG-2 decode
Hardware accelerated iDCT, motion
compensation, and color space conversion
Top quality DVD and all-format DTV/HDTV
decode with low CPU overhead
Back-end scaler delivers top quality
playback
Upscaling and downscaling with 4-tap
horizontal and vertical filtering
Filtered display of images up to 1920
pixels wide
Unique per-pixel adaptive
de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of
the ?bob? and ?add-field? (weave) techniques
FULLSTREAM?
video de-blocking technology
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Noise removal filtering for captured
video
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MPEG-2 decoding with motion
compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
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All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
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YPrPb component output
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Adaptive de-interlacing and frame
rate conversion
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Dual integrated display controllers
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Dual integrated 10-bit per channel
400MHz DACs
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Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI
and HDCP compliant)
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Integrated TV Output support up to
1024x768 resolution
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Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD
Athlon? 3Dnow!
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PC 2002 compliant
DISPLAY FEATURES
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Dual integrated display controllers
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Drive two displays simultaneously
with independent resolutions and refresh rates
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HYDRAVISION? software provides
complete control over multi-display configurations
with a user-friendly interface
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Dual integrated 10-bit per channel
palette DACs operating at up to 400MHz
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Integrated 165MHz TMDS transmitter
supports resolutions up to QXGA (2048x1536) and
complies with DVI and HDCP specifications
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Integrated TV-Out support up to
1024x768 resolution
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YPrPb output for direct drive of HDTV
monitors
DISPLAY SUPPORT
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15-pin VGA connector for analog CRT
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S-video or composite connector for
TV/VCR
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DVI-I connector for digital CRT or
flat panel
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Independent resolutions and refresh
rates for any two connected displays
GENERAL FEATURES
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Comprehensive 2x, 4x, and 8x AGP
support
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High performance quad-channel DDR or
DDR2 memory interface supports 64/128/256MB
configurations
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Fully compliant with PC 2002
requirements
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Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD
Athlon? 3Dnow! processor instructions
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Supports optional THEATER? 200
companion chip for NTSC/PAL/SECAM video capture
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Highly optimized 128-bit 2D engine
with support for new Windows® XP GDI extensions
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CLICK ANY IMAGE FOR AN
ENLARGED VIEW
The 256MB ATi
Radeon 9800 Pro's board layout is similar to the 128MB
model, but with a few notable exceptions. The front
and back sides of the PCB each have eight, 16MB DDR-II
modules installed, clocked at 700MHz (350MHz DDR).
The 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro has DDR-I type memory clocked at
680MHz (340MHz DDR). The increase in memory clock
speed brings total bandwidth up to 22.4GB/Sec, versus
21.8GB/Sec on the 128MB card. The core is clocked at
380MHz on both versions of the 9800 Pro, which is cooled
by the same aluminum HSF. The 256MB board also has
the added benefit of heatsinks installed on the RAM.
Don't expect every 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro to look just like
ours, however. We're sure a few OEMs will design
custom cooling solutions and may even release cards with
different clock speeds than the "ATi Built" model we have
here. As you can see in the pictures above, the
256MB board is slightly longer than the 128MB version, but
it is not quite as large as a GeForce 4 Ti4600.
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HIGH-QUALITY
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VERY
HIGH-QUALITY |
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| So, what does
having 256MB of memory installed on a video card mean to
gamers? Well, there are three main benefits.
First, having more memory available means game developers
can use larger, higher quality textures without having to
swap data in and out of system memory. The screen
shots above are from Asheron's Call 2. The shot on
the left represents the game's "High Quality" graphics
mode. The shot on the right is of a "Very High
Quality" mode available to owners of video cards with
256MB of RAM. The differences between the two images
are clearly evident. The "Very High Quality" shot is
far more detailed and realistic. The second benefit
to having more available video memory is being able to run
at higher resolutions with Antialiasing and Anisotropic
Filtering enabled. With the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro
users will be able to enable 4X AA at resolutions all the
way up to 2048x1536 and with 6X AA up to 1920x1200.
Lastly, there will be less of a performance penalty for
enabling AA or Aniso Filtering at high resolutions.
Next Up - Image
Quality...
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