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Taking risks is a way of
life for people as well as companies, if there is a desire
to achieve and be the best at what they do. If you
look at the patterns and modus operendi of the average "over
achiever", you'll note that taking chances and educated
risks is standard procedure. Often times an
individual, if they are to expand their scope of influence
or grow, needs to take themselves "out of their element" and
take the risk of something totally new, foreign or
innovative. Likewise, one certainly could draw a
conclusion on the pattern and run of enormous success, that
NVIDIA has achieved over the past few years, to that of
their ability to pioneer new frontiers and take risks with
new technologies in the 3D Graphics arena. However,
along with risk comes the obvious downside of possible
failure, at least on the first attempt where one hopes to
learn from their mistakes.
Earlier
this year, NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced to the
press that future generation GPU products coming from
NVIDIA, will be based on .13 micron fab process
technologies. Most likely at some point earlier in the
year, during the NV30's architectural design phase, the R&D
team at NVIDIA made the decision to take an educated risk
and move to this next generation process geometry with their
fab partner TSMC. Unfortunately this time, the company
that had been so successful pioneering new 3D Graphics
technologies, took a risk that ultimately cost them a
valuable product introduction cycle and afforded their
primary rival ATi, a huge advantage in next generation
competitive products. There has been plenty of
speculation on who was at fault with respect to the delay of
the NV30, TSMC or NVIDIA but that's not the point really, is
it? The position that ATi is in today, with the
introduction of the Radeon 9700 Pro, is a direct result of
the company making the decision to stick with a
significantly more mature .15 micron process for their R300
VPU.
Mass
production ready and with a core clock of 325MHz, the Radeon
9700 Pro is ATi's "Big Gun" pointed directly at NVIDIA's
GeForce 4 product line, in this battle for PC 3D Graphics
supremacy. It boasts full DX9 compliance before the
API is even officially released by Microsoft and it's here
today in our lab, as well as arriving to retail shelves
around the globe. The Radeon 9700 Pro looks to be the
proverbial "leapfrog" for ATi. We're here to show you
all the gory details as ATi releases their alleged "GeForce
4 killer". As the saying goes, "the numbers don't
lie". So let's dig in, shall we?
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Features
of the Radeon 9700
Pro |
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A GeForce 4 Ti4600
Killer |
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Click To
Enlarge
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GRAPHICS
TECHNOLOGY
RADEON? 9700 Visual
Processing Unit (VPU)
325MHz Core Clock
MEMORY CONFIGURATION
3D
GRAPHICS FEATURES
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Eight parallel
rendering pipelines process up to 2.6
billion pixels per second
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Four parallel geometry
engines process up to 325 million
transformed and lit polygons per
second
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High precision 10-bit
per channel framebuffer support
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256-bit DDR memory
interface
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AGP 8X support
-SMARTSHADER? 2.0
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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 up to 1024
instructions with flow control
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New 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?
2.0
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State-of-the-art
full-scene anti-aliasing
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New technology
processes up to 15.6 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
-HYPERZ? III
-TRUFORM? 2.0
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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
VIDEO
FEATURES
-VIDEOSHADER?
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Seamless integration of
programmable pixel shaders with video
data
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High quality, hardware
accelerated de-blocking of internet
streaming video
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Noise removal filter
for captured video
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Integrated MPEG-2
decode
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Hardware accelerated
iDCT, motion compensation, and color
space conversion
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Top quality DVD and
all-format DTV/HDTV decode with low
CPU overhead
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Back-end scaler
delivers top quality playback
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Upscaling and
downscaling with 4-tap horizontal and
vertical filtering
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Filtered display of
images up to 1920 pixels wide
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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 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
We covered much of the feature detail
of the R300 GPU in
our initial preview of the card back in July.
However, we'll go through a few of the key architectural
enhancements, again for you later in this article. For
now let's look at things strictly from a hardware
perspective.
The Card:
The Radeon 9700 Pro is
actually somewhat smaller than a GeForce 4 Ti card but a
little larger than a Radeon 8500 or 9000 board. In
addition on the back end of the board, as you'll note in the
front faced shot above, there is a 4 pin floppy drive power
connector that feeds an additional 12V supply to the card
directly from the systems power supply. Since the R300
VPU draws so much power, it may actually stress the
capability of some systems to deliver enough power through
the AGP connector. This additional power source to the
board ensure cross platform compatibility. We did try
powering up with the connector unplugged and the system
indeed would not post.
Click To
Enlarge
There are also dual output
connectors, one standard VGA and one DVI, with an included
DVI converter for dual VGA output if desired. Finally,
in addition to a large heat sink and fan assembly, the
Radeon 9700 Pro comes equipped with
350MHz DDR SDRAM from Samsung. This is essentially
700MHz capable memory but the Radeon 9700 Pro runs the
interface at a stock speed of 620MHz (310MHz DDR).
Also, the memory controller on the R300 VPU is capable of
utilizing DDR II memory when it is available for even more
aggregate bandwidth in future products. Speaking of
which let's take a look at the speeds and feeds of the R300
VPU as well as its new Smartshader 2.0, Smooth Vision 2.0
and Video Processing engines.
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Architecture and Features
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