ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

Going head-to-head with Nvidia's Geforce FX 5800 Ultra, ATI's top-of-the line Radeon 9800 Pro chip is a force to be reckoned with.

The new design incorporates eight rendering pipelines, supports 8x AGP and offers a 256bit DDR memory interface. However, the improved 0.15micron silicon can handle up to 256MB of Ram, double that of the previous chip, and runs at 380 instead of 325MHz.

Enhancements start with version 2.1 of ATI's Smartshader, whose 'F-buffer' supports pixel shader programs with apparently unlimited instructions.

This allows for highly complex images to be drawn quickly, as more detail can be layered on without resorting to multi-pass rendering. The 9700 only allows 64 shader instructions, while the Geforce FX can process up to 1,024.

Other improvements include an update to ATI's Smoothvision for faster frame rates with anti-aliasing, while the Hyper Z III+ version of Z-buffer is optimised for realtime shadows.

We tested a 128MB card, and the results were good, though not the great leap forward we were expecting.

A 3Dmark score of 15,442 is impressive but it's only around 500 higher than the best 9700 Pro score, while the Geforce FX comes in at 16,154. In real-world tests we were more impressed, with frame rates of over 65fps on games even at 1,600 x 1,200.

Given the scores, it's hard to recommend the 9800 Pro over its sibling, but the potential impact of the F-buffer shouldn't be underestimated.

We expect to see a performance boost once games start to put it to good use.

Contact: ATI
www.ati.com

Specifications:

• 380MHz core
• 680MHz DDR-memory clock speed
• 128MB DDR-Ram at 340MHz
• Dual 400MHz Ramdacs
• Memory bandwidth 21.8Gbps
• VGA, DVI & S-Video outputs
• DirectX9, OpenGL 2.0
• AGP 4x/8x