Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro & Gigabyte GV-R9700

The most expensive gaming graphics cards aren't great sellers, but they do lend credibility to a manufacturer. ATI has been lagging behind Nvidia since the launch of Geforce2, but things have now changed.

ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro chip, previously codenamed R300, is blisteringly fast, and both the Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro and Gigabyte GV-R9700 feature this DirectX 9-compliant chip.

The chip has 106 million transistors on a 0.15micron fabricated chip running at 325MHz. The 128MB of DDR BGA memory runs at 310MHz, which is the equivalent of 620MHz.

Those figures are very similar to Ti4600 with one notable exception. Radeon 9700 uses a 256bit DDR memory interface while the Ti4600 has 128bit DDR, so Radeon 9700 has a massive peak memory bandwidth of 24.8Gbps, even greater than the previous record holder - Matrox's Parhelia.

Both cards from Sapphire and Gigabyte are about the size of ATI's Radeon 8500 and have three outputs for VGA, S-Video, DVI-I. You also get a DVI-to-VGA adaptor and TV connection cables.

The heatsink/fan unit on the 9700's graphics chip is larger than previous Radeons, because of its power requirements. The Radeon 9700 draws 40w of power.

This is more than the AGP bus can supply, so ATI has added a power connector similar to that on a floppy drive. We haven't seen this approach since 3dfx released its Voodoo5 5500 in 1999.

Both manufacturers include an adaptor cable so you can connect the cards to either a floppy drive connector or a regular hard drive/CD Molex connector, but it is essential you connect the cable, as your PC won't work without the extra power.

ATI recommends you use an ATX power supply rated at 300w or more with the Radeon 9700.

Other system requirements include at least 128MB of memory, although we can't see the 9700 being used in a low-end PC. Naturally you need an AGP slot too, and ATI gives you the choice of AGP 2x (3.3v), 4x (1.5v) or universal AGP 3.0.

It also supports the new AGP 8x standard. We don't expect that to make much of a difference, but it is likely to be an exercise in future proofing.

We tested the two cards head to head with a Chaintech Geforce4 Ti4600 in a Pentium 4 PC in two configurations. One had a 2GHz processor on a 400MHz FSB (front-side bus) with 256MB of PC800 RD-Ram. We then fitted a 2.8GHz processor on a 533MHz FSB with 768MB of PC1066 RD-Ram.

We originally tested the Ti4600 using Detonator 30.82 drivers, but Nvidia launched a new version 40.41 to coincide with the launch of Radeon 9700 and claimed the driver would give Ti4600 a speed increase of up to 25 per cent.

We partially retested the Chaintech with these new drivers and noted an increase of around 10 per cent.

Looking at the results, the sad fact is that even a 2GHz P4 cannot do the fastest graphics cards justice. When tested on a 2.8GHz P4, however, there were no such problems.

In 3Dmark at 1,024 x 768 with no FSAA (full-scene anti-aliasing) the Radeon has a decisive 2,100 mark advantage over the Ti4600. Under 2 x FSAA and the same resolution, both cards dropped to just over 13,000.

When we bumped the resolution up to 1,600 x 1,200, the two cards found implementing FSAA tougher, but still took it in their stride achieving just under 9,000, while the Ti4600 score was nearly halved.

This is surely an effect of the massive memory bandwidth of the Radeon 9700, and it makes FSAA a good bet for most users. In our OpenGL tests the Radeon and Ti4600 scored nearly identical frame rates, so little was proved there.

One of the major issues here is that we have no DirectX 9 games or tests as yet, so we can't test how proficient the chip is at running these applications.

However, we will be putting DirectX 9 (and any compatible cards) through its paces as soon as it is released.

Part of the reason for the Radeon 9700's blazing performance is Hyperz III, which decreases the load on memory bandwidth.

The technology uses the depth, or Z dimension, of components in a 3D image to ensure objects to the front of the image get priority. Hidden or occluded pixels won't be seen, so they need to be identified and then ignored.

ATI has also worked on Truform and included version 2 to increase the realism of curved surfaces. Truform 2 uses tessellation to increase the polygon count in the most visible objects in a scene, making them look more natural.

The Radeon 9700 also incorporates Smoothvision 2, which improves on the original anti-aliasing algorithms and anisotropic filtering techniques, giving impeccable 2D and 3D quality.

In June ATI launched Catalyst, a unified driver. This is a radical departure from previous ATI drivers as it installed flawlessly and gave excellent performance and stability.

It also gave reviewers a couple of months to gain confidence in Catalyst. This was an intelligent move by ATI and it sums up its approach to the Radeon 9700 Pro.

It's very likely that Nvidia's next chip, codenamed NV30, will grab back the performance crown in a few months, but that's just speculation.

Right now ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro is the fastest desktop graphics chip on the market, making mincemeat of DirectX 8.1 games and applications. But the best thing is that because it's fully DirectX 9 compatible, it's relatively future-proof.

The Gigabyte card costs £45 less than the Sapphire and, with no difference in performance or features, therefore receives a Recommended award.

DETAILS

PRICE
Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro: £349.99 (£297.86 ex VAT)

Gigabyte GV-R9700: £305.50 (£260 ex VAT)

CONTACT
Sapphire

Gigabyte

DIRECTX EXPLAINED
Towards the end of each year, Microsoft releases the latest version of its API (Application Programming Interface) DirectX.

DirectX 8.1 gave us Vertex Shaders (version 1.1) and Pixel Shaders (version 1.3). Both are hardware technologies, so they can only be fully implemented by a true DirectX 8.1 graphics card.

DirectX 9 is due later this year and at the time of writing is in beta 2. It will include enhanced Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders, but nothing has been confirmed. ATI calls these technologies Smartshader 2.

We expect to see full support for AGP 8x and probably DDR2 graphics memory too, but Microsoft is playing its cards very close to its chest.

In a sense the release of DirectX 9 is a red herring as we won't see software and games using it until 2003. Indeed we have only seen bits of DirectX 8.1 games so far.

As ever, software writers can't use new features until there is suitable hardware on sale, and hardware vendors gain nothing by working to new standards until the software appears.

This chicken and egg situation guarantees that each year we get new graphics cards we can't use properly for many months.