With the release of the Radeon 9700 Pro, ATi has turned the tables on NVIDIA
for both 3D Gaming performance, and just as important; their driver support
has improved greatly over the past year with the release of their unified driver
sets. Before this sudden change ATi was simply a mass producer of video cards
most commonly found in laptops and large OEM manufacturers such as Compaq and
Dell. The 8500 helped change the public’s opinion of ATi but it certainly
wasn’t enough to battle the GeForce 4 and was too late to make a dramatic
impact on their sales. The 8500 had gained the performance needed to be a top
contender but lacked drivers capable of utilizing the card while ensuring stability.
With the rumors of NV30, ATi was making headway on their Radeon 9700 Pro. It
was soon clear ATi would finish their product before NVIDIA, and provide a
decent gaming experience. The launch of the Radeon 9700 Pro was an exciting
time of the year, clearly in time for the holiday season, and was only plagued
by compatibility issues with certain VIA chipsets.
The
enthusiast video card market is a difficult market to constantly keep on the
top especially with gamers looking purely at performance and not loyalty
to any specific branding. For the most part LAN Parties were dominated by the
GeForce series until the unveiling of the Radeon 9700 series took place and
the in with the new, out with the old applied to these gamers! This isn’t
entirely a new trend in gamers when choosing video cards as we’ve seen
it before with the demise of 3Dfx. The difference now between NVIDIA and 3Dfx
is financially. With NVIDIA’s nForce 2 chipset beginning to dominate
the motherboard market on Athlon based motherboards we can conclude that NVIDIA
can afford to take a short vacation from being number one. The real question
we have now is will the NV35 challenge ATi finally or will NVIDIA enjoy a longer
than expected vacation from being the king of performance? Today, thanks to
ATi we have both the fastest available video card, the Radeon 9800 Pro and
of course one of the more popular pre-release demos. What more could we ask
for?
Enough of the talk about the video card market lets get into the actual card.
We have a Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB for our review and I must say it has certainly
made a large difference from even the 9700 Pro however not in regards with
frames per second. The biggest change we will see is in support of the video
card and compatibility.
Product
There is little physical change between the Radeon 9700 Pro and Radeon 9800
Pro 128mb versions as you can plainly see here. The changes most noticeable
include the 4 pin molex connector for power, and a much needed redesign of
the heat sink fan unit. ATi has really been doing a much better job recently,
we can all remember the standard green PCB coloring used by ATi with the Radeon
8500, with the Radeon 9X00 series they’ve re-invented the PCB coloring
and threw in a few gibs to give it the amazing red color we see today…well
maybe not gibs but they did make it red!
I was very happy to see that ATi changed the power connector on the 9800;
previously they were using the mini molex connector, generally reserved for
floppy drives and made it difficult to remove the product from your computer
once the power had locked itself in place. The 4 pin molex connector holds
just as well, and if you swap video cards regularly, you’d appreciate
this small change as well.
Here we can see the heat sink fan unit on the Radeon 9800 Pro and Radeon
9700 Pro. As we can see here the Radeon 9700 Pro’s heat sink fan was
nothing spectacular and was common among all ATi Video cards for quite some
time now. The Radeon 9800 Pro’s heat sink fan was welcome to be changed
as I never fancied the black and boring heat sink fan on their cards. As you
can see, the simple change of a heat sink fan makes a world of a difference
in the final looks of the product.
Recently you may have noticed a small news bit originating from the creators
of Half-Life 2 stating that both the Radeon and GeForce FX video cards are
incompatible with their programming style due to the way their Direct X 9 Shader
currently works with Anti-aliasing. Now this might seem like a major problem
for everyone who just went out and spent their life savings on the Radeon or
a GeForce FX video card, however Gabe Newell from Valve Software clears this
up, and basically stats that the Radeon 9800 Pro was a lot easier to fix then
the competitions however both video cards should be able to play Half-Life
2 with Anti-aliasing and suffer no artifacts.
“Since
people seem to be hyperventilating over the anti-aliasing issue,
I thought I'd
update everyone.
1) How bad is the problem?
With current multi-sample implementations of anti-aliasing, you may sample
texels outside of the polygon boundary, which may result in sampling light
maps from other polygons.
This has always been a problem. This is a problem with Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake
3, Daikatana, Sin, Elite Force, Half-Life, Counter-Strike on the X-Box, or
any game that uses packed lightmaps with multi-sample anti-aliasing.
You would see these artifacts on polygon boundaries where the wrong lightmap
is being sampled. It will look like a bright or dark line on the edge of a
polygon.
Gary McTaggart brought this up in an email because he is being pretty hardcore
about graphics quality right now. This is not a new problem. If you've run
a game that uses lightmaps with anti-aliasing turned on, then you've been seeing
these artifacts the whole time.
Artifacts may show up more frequently in Half-Life 2 simply because we've
eliminated lots of other artifacts, and because we have a lot of variation
in scene lighting due to our art direction.
To put this in perspective, not doing tri-linear filtering on mipmaps is a
lot worse.
2) What are potential solutions?
• Support
Centroid Sampling
• Use Pixel Shaders to Clamp Texture Coordinates
Centroid sampling doesn't have the problem that center sampling does in multi-sample
antil-aliasing. ATI has supported this form of anti-aliasing for the 9000 series.
The tricky part is enabling this when DirectX doesn't easily expose this.
There's a different trick you can use with hardware, such as NVIDIA's, that
doesn't support centroid sampling. Basically you trade off some pixel shader
bandwidth to clamp the texture coordinates so that you don't sample texels
outside of that polygon's lightmap sub-rect.
Between these two approaches, multi-sample anti-aliasing artifacts should
be a non-issue for any DX9-level hardware running Pixel Shader 2.0.
3) How will this look?
We'll release
one of the demo movies with the anti-aliasing artifacts in and one
with the
anti-aliasing changes.”
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Here we can see the heat sink fan unit on the Radeon 9800 Pro and Radeon
9700 Pro. As we can see here the Radeon 9700 Pro’s heat sink fan was
nothing spectacular and was common among all ATi Video cards for quite some
time now. The Radeon 9800 Pro’s heat sink fan was welcome to be changed
as I never fancied the black and boring heat sink fan on their cards. As you
can see, the simple change of a heat sink fan makes a world of a difference
in the final looks of the product.
