Radeon 9700 & 9000 launch

[chaoliang]

Are there any detailed comparison of 2D performance and visual quality between P and Ati products?
Will 9700 have as good 2D quality as that of G400?

[mallowman]

Originally posted by Indiana

I really like those new desktop video features (indepence from overlays for video-playback, the whole FullStream and VideoShader technologies truely seem impressive,...)

Believe it or not even the G400 has support for video textures. The linux drivers even have an option to use the texture engine instead of an overlay for video scaling. Although the ability to process the video sources with pixel shaders seems really interesting.

From the G400 whitepaper:

Multiple YUV source texture formats for Video Stream
Texture Mapping

[The PIT]

Originally posted by chaoliang
Are there any detailed comparison of 2D performance and visual quality between P and Ati products?
Will 9700 have as good 2D quality as that of G400?

Haven't seen this mentioned anywhere yet reviewers tend to go more for fps than image quality. If the 9700 is better than the 8500 it will close to the quality of the G400 cards.

[CaineTanathos]

Buback: my favorite color is Red, but I like blue too, I don't like green. Anyway I got a Ti200 at the moment

Lets compare the Parhelia against the 9700 (correct me if I am wrong with some stuff):

1) the clockrate: Well if you look at the size of the heatsink... I think the heatsink of the parhelia is very small, I think if you put a bigger one on it and the overclock program is out you can easily put it at 250 - 260. But the 9700 will still beat it in raw performance ,pixel performance anyway.

2) the memory bus: Both cards have a 256 bits wide one. But there are some differences . The Parhelia has well... I couldn't find more info about the memory controllers (if someone knows let post it please). The 9700 supports a 256-bit DDR memory bus made up of four individual load-balanced 64-bit memory controllers like NVIDIA’s Crossbar architecture, which is very efficient.

3) Vertex Pipeline : Both have 4 vertex shaders and I think the only difference is that the Parhelia has a max of 512 intstructions and the 9700 1024 instructions

4) Pixel Pipeline : The Parhelia has 4 pixel pipelines (64bit integer ? or something else ? anyone) and each pipe line has four texture units. 9700 has 8 pixelpipe lines and each pipe line has only 1 texture unit.

5) Pixel shader : The 9700 has 8 PS 2.0 and has a floating point Color processor, so this results in higher quality . The parhelia has 4 PS 1.3 not too bad eather

6) Texture unit: Parhelia has per pipeline 4 texture units each can handle 1 texture and only billinear (WHY not trillinear?)
9700 has only 1 texture unit per pipeline and now I am gonna guess but since it can handle 16 textures , I think that each TU can handle 2 textures , but not sure.
The anisotropic filtering with the 9700 is a seperate unit. I am not sure how its done with the parhelia, but I think it just uses the texture units , but with more passes.

Something else I am wondering, what does the Depth acceleration Unit do in the Parhelia, is it something like the hyper-z thingy ?

[RichL]

It seems Overclockers.Com are none too impressed with Tom or Anand's impartiality in reviews.

http://www.overclockers.com/tips061/

I gotta admit though, it does rather look like ATI have delivered a lot closer to the hyped expectations than Matrox have.

[CaineTanathos]

the movies are pretty cool from ati:

http://mirror2.ati.com/misc/demos/ATI-9700-animusic-Demo-v1.0.mpg

http://mirror2.ati.com/misc/demos/ATI-9700-rnl-Demo-v1.0.mpg

[GT98]

I was just reading over at HardOCP with a link to Rage3D that the Raedon 9000 & 9700 aren't going to support Win98....and a bunch of people are bitching about that, sounds familar

[CaineTanathos]

But do you know if there will be a dx9.0 version of 98 ?

[The PIT]

Bugger looks like I will be forced to upgrade to buggy XP and then buy a new steering wheel.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by RichL
It seems Overclockers.Com are none too impressed with Tom or Anand's impartiality in reviews.

http://www.overclockers.com/tips061/

I gotta admit though, it does rather look like ATI have delivered a lot closer to the hyped expectations than Matrox have.

Mmm must be blind didn't see Tom or Anand mentioned anywhere. However I don't trust reviews too much. I've bought too much junk over the years becuase of reviews. So I now look at places like this and other forums.
If I can see a product running I'll have a look it's the only way.

[PeTe]

Originally posted by GT98
I was just reading over at HardOCP with a link to Rage3D that the Raedon 9000 & 9700 aren't going to support Win98....and a bunch of people are bitching about that, sounds familar

Get your facts straight.


Copy + Paste from [H]ardOCP:

---------------

Please read the following statement from Microsoft, "WHQL will no longer accept certain submissions".

Beginning 01 July 2002, at 12:01 A.M. PST, WHQL will no longer accept submissions for all hardware devices and systems for the following operating systems. This includes all submission types for all devices and systems.

Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (SE)
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
Windows NT 4.0 Server

As a reminder, WHQL previously stopped accepting submissions for Windows 98 Gold in the latter part of 1999.



Now what ATi has to say:

The only operating systems that Microsoft currently accepts as part of their WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certification process are:

Windows 2000
Windows ME
Windows XP

Since the RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9000 series of cards from ATI were released after the July 1st date, there was no way to obtain certification for these drivers. Microsoft certification of drivers is the most significant 3rd party qualification of a devices stability and quality. ATI's CATALYST drivers are based on the foundation of stability and quality and as such every driver that ATI makes available must go through Microsoft certification.

Although Microsoft no longer certifies devices under those operating systems, ATI still supports them. Users of Windows 98 and Windows 98 (SE) just simply need to use the WHQL certified Windows ME driver provided both on our shipping CD's and on our website. ATI also has an NT4 driver available for the RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 Pro which will be made available shortly.

Furthermore users of those operating systems are still supported by ATI's customer care program and can still obtain technical support.

Hope this clarifies the situation, and alleviates concerns.

------------

Again, nothing to do with ATI, its all MS.

Pe-Te

[GT98]

Originally posted by PeTe


Get your facts straight.

When I posted this message the info from the ATI hadnt made its rounds on the forums...which was yesterday and the calafication came this morning...

[The_King]

Originally posted by RichL
It seems Overclockers.Com are none too impressed with Tom or Anand's impartiality in reviews.

http://www.overclockers.com/tips061/

I gotta admit though, it does rather look like ATI have delivered a lot closer to the hyped expectations than Matrox have.

I see their point about the clockspeed. I mean ATI could change it anyway they like. What I dont understand in that article is how they reject the idea of benchmarking at 1600x1200. What the hell??? People want to know whether the video card they are buying is fast. The only way of doing this is to run demanding benchmarks. If benchmarks were run at 1024x768, then all this is showing is who has the best driver optimizations. Most people dont run at 16x12, but a high result at this res will give a good indication of how long the card will last in terms of performance....

[Novdid]

That Overclockers guy needs to take a deep breath and stop drooling over the nvidia logo he has on his box. I'm not saying that Anand or Tom are not whoring (imo they are), my point is that almost every crap he threw at ATI also applies to nvidia.

The R300 seems to be a much, much better choice than the Ti4600. Why??? Cause the price is the same, atleast here in Europe.

[RichL]

Originally posted by The PIT


Mmm must be blind didn't see Tom or Anand mentioned anywhere. However I don't trust reviews too much. I've bought too much junk over the years becuase of reviews. So I now look at places like this and other forums.
If I can see a product running I'll have a look it's the only way.

Its not mentioned in the text directly, but the hyperlinks go to Toms and Anands.

I admit I also have a tendancy to rely on review sites, simply because most of them have the abilities/equipment to do stuff I cant, like comparing X number of motherboards side by side.