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When ATi
released the Radeon 9800 Pro earlier this year, the
Toronto, Ontario Canada design team, had been working with
a strong foundation, that was built on their most
successful card ever, the Radeon 9700 Pro. The base
GPU architecture that would drive several iterations of
performance enthusiast, mid range and mainstream products,
was paying off in spades, versus their fiercest rival,
NVIDIA. At the same time, NVIDIA was failing to
execute on any meaningful competitive new design effort.
The combination of NVIDIA's technological stutter-stepping
and ATi's seemingly flawless execution, provided a new
product springboard unlike any other in the Canadian
company's history. When the Radeon 9800 Pro was
launched in March '03, it had literally no competition,
with NVIDIA's follow-up to the miserably botched GeForce
FX 5800, still months away. Even then, when NVIDIA
was able to finally unleash the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra,
since it had to compete with ATi's second generation VPU,
its impact and market splash was diminished, versus what
should have been a block-buster release for the Silicon
Valley rocket-ship semiconductor company.
Then of course
came the controversy. This little industry certainly
does love controversy now doesn't it? Accusations of
NVIDIA's driver optimizations, targeted at specific
benchmarks and the defacement of a perfectly useful
benchmarking tool and company, all spun up into a quagmire
of trash-talking and mud-slinging, which certainly didn't
help NVIDIA win any popularity contests. At the end
of the day, all the chatter and rhetoric didn't amount to
much more than surface noise. Or did it? ATi
was riding out the storm quietly, as industry analysts and
editors scrambled to find a level playing field and new
methodologies for measuring performance in consumer
graphics. The simple push-button time-demo
benchmark, is now beginning to fade into the sunset, as
new "customized" benchmark runs are being created and new
game engines with DirectX 9 effects enter the scene.
Although benchmark optimizations have been going on in the
industry for quite some time, no one really understood the
depth of the issues and since many benchmarks are based on
actual game engines by in large, those optimizations
benefited the end user experience as well.
Regardless, the game has changed forever, in PC Graphics
benchmarking and although we'll spend some longer hours in
the lab here, it's all for the better.
Meanwhile,
this enormous diversion was exactly what ATi needed, to
steal the GeForce FX 5900's thunder, and allow them the
ability to ready their mid-life kicker product, that we
have for your on the test bench today. The Radeon
9800 XT is based on the "new" R360 VPU, which is basically
an R350 with kicked up speeds and feeds, Emeril Lagasee
style. True to its branding, the Radeon 9800 XT
doesn't bring any changes in graphics core architecture,
but rather delivers just a bit more of a good thing,
ever-precious clock speed.
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Specifications & Features of the 256MB ATi
Radeon 9800 XT |
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Bigger, Meaner, Faster |
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RADEON? 9800 Visual
Processing Unit (VPU)MHz
Core Clock
MEMORY CONFIGURATION
MB
of DDR SDRAM - 730MHz DDR
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
Alright, we'll
admit it too. We try to keep over-exuberance in
check around here, in an effort to remain objective.
However, the first thing that came to mind, when we saw
the Radeon 9800 XT, was sort of a primal simian grunt,
rather than an actual thought. Arrrgghh, arrgghh...
more power! Now there's a heat-sink and cooling
setup that can bring out the monkey man (or woman) in all
of us. Folks, this thing is gorgeous. With a
spiral bladed fan that measures nearly 80mm across and an
all copper sink, this card is decked out like our old 72
GTO, chromed and braided with the hood up for show in the
parking lot. Since the Radeon 9800 XT is built on
the same VPU core technology, only at a revved up higher
clock speed, it's no small wonder that ATi went to great
lengths to develop a strong cooling solution. After
all, these new 412MHz core and 730MHz memory clocks have
to stand up to rigorous quality assurance test patterns
ATi's QA torture chamber, before it can be considered
"retail ready"..
BACKSIDE COOLING |
FUNKY BRACKET |
GPU MOUNT |
Back side
cooling has also now been added to the design, as we have
seen in recent NVIDIA products, like the NV30 and NV35.
The copper plate on this card, also has riveted posts that
push up through the PCB and mate with the top side sink,
where spring-loaded retention screws crank everything
together. The back side of the card also has a
pressure bracket that mounts directly across the GPU.
The bracket locks into place with simple pressure fit
mount over the heat sink posts that come through the PCB
on either side of the VPU. However, this clip is a
bit too free-floating for our liking and could easily be
popped off inadvertently in handling or installation.
We're hopeful that ATi will come up with a better
retention clip design for this back side area of the
board. Regardless, the entire assembly does a great
job of cooling the card under pressure. The fan is an
obvious design enhancement that left us wondering why it
hadn't been implemented on other graphics cards
previously. Larger fan blades push larger volumes of
air across the heat sink area, without the need to
increase the RPM speed.
In addition,
the Radeon 9800 XT does have the ability to throttle the
fan speed higher or lower, depending on VPU core
temperatures and 3D workload. However, the noise
factor is kept to a minimum and these cards are noticeably
quieter than any of the current stock GeForce FX
implementations we've had in the lab.
The Radeon 9600 XT
Makes Its Debut And Drivers
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