Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis

 
Sapphire Radeon 9200 128MB

Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis 128MB

• 250MHz Core Clock

MEMORY CONFIGURATION

• 128MB of DDR  SDRAM - 200MHz DDR (Effective 400MHz)

  CHARISMA ENGINE II

  • Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second

  • High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine

  • Advanced vertex shader support for the latest programmable effects

  SMARTSHADER? Technology

  • Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware

  • 1.4 Pixel Shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass

  • 1.1 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions

  • Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles

  • Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL via extensions

  SMOOTHVISION?

  • Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D? and OpenGL ® applications

  • Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes

  • Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact

  HYPER Z? II

  • Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth by up to 25%

    VIDEO FEATURES

    • FULLSTREAM? Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams

    • VIDEO IMMERSION? II delivers industry leading DVD playback

    • Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage

    • Unique adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques

    • YUV to RGB color space conversion

    • Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback

    • 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering

    • Upscaling and downscaling

    • Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide

    • Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems

    • Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics

      EXTRA FEATURES

    • Supports the new AGP 8X standard (2.0 GB/sec)

    • VIVO ( Video In & Video Out )

    • 128-bit floating-point color precision allows for a greater range of colors and brightness
       

    The Radeon 9200 Atlantis Up Close Feature packed mainstream graphics solution

    PACKAGING AND BUNDLE

    		The Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis comes with full VIVO support and because of that it packs all of the cabling one would need to take advantage of this feature.  The cabling provides S-Video and Composite Video in and out, as well as Audio input, to capture movies and the like.  Sapphire also throws in a DVI-to-Analog adapter for anyone using an LCD monitor.  The box ships with some impressive software as well, although we're sorry to say, Sapphire did not bundle any games with this card.  We do have Pinnacle Studio 8 included which is an excellent piece of software for all your video capturing / editing needs.  Also among the contents you'll find Cyberlink's PowerDVD XP v4.0 which is very capable DVD-playback software.  A Driver Installation CD and Sapphire's Redline tweaking tool are included as well.  All together a very impressive bundle provided by Sapphire considering this card's price. SAPPHIRE'S REDLINE v1.9 Sapphire ships their own utility with their graphics cards dubbed Redline.  The Redline tool is a fairly powerful utility that allows users to tweak most of the card's settings from within Windows.  Options like anisotropic filtering, antialiasing, screen settings and so on are adjustable through this tool.  There is also an option to save any particular settings the user likes for gaming modes, 2D environments so they don't have to be manually adjusted every time.  Simply select the saved profile and voila, the settings are in place.  The Redline utility usually allows for overclocking as well, but unfortunately the Sapphire Radeon 9200 card is locked and is not overclockable.  Overall, this is a very nice tool provided by Sapphire and is definitely an added bonus for the end user. A CLOSER LOOK AT THE HARDWARE Attached to the Radeon 9200 GPU is a passive aluminum heatsink which is fairly small in size.  A side view of the heatsink shows how this cooling device is mounted to the GPU with a thermal pad.  Although this does cover ample surface area between the GPU and the heatsink, we would have preferred to see a heatsink that is mounted on the board via retention springs and uses thermal grease to transport the heat from the GPU to the heatsink.  With that said, the heatsink does get hot to the touch while the card is in use, so the heatsink is performing its job adequately enough. This board is equipped with 4ns Hynix 309A memory modules clocked at 200MHz ( 400MHz effective ).  There are 8x16MB memory modules for a total of 128MB of memory ( 4 modules on top of the card, 4 on the back side ).  While there is some room for overclocking the memory, this board is "clock-locked" and cannot be overclocked.  Maybe a future BIOS hack will prove us wrong, but for now, the GPU ( 250MHz ) and memory ( 400MHz ) won't budge on this card.  Taking over the VIVO duties is the ATI Rage Theater chip placed just to the left of the heatsink.  The rear-slot bracket provides S-Video In/Out, AV-In/Out, and an Analog Monitor adapter.  Even with all these features, the board is still fairly wide open.  Let's plug this baby in and get some screen shots, shall we...