Pixel-Churners: A round-up of Radeon 9700 PRO cards – THG.RU

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Solid Front

The heart of a Radeon 9700 PRO card, the R300 chip.

Christmas is coming and the latest games are bringing computers to their knees. Fall is the perfect time to get your computer in shape again to cope with the increasingly demanding requirements of games. And if you’re looking for the latest and greatest graphics card around, you won’t have to look any farther than ATi’s new Radeon 9700 PRO. It already supports DirectX 9, even though Microsoft hasn’t officially published the latest update for its 3D interface. But even given today’s batch of games, it offers far and away the best performance and the highest-quality display capabilities. There is an alternative to 9700 PRO – the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, which has already started showing its age. While it makes a good showing in the standard benchmarks, it falls off steeply in full-scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, lagging considerably behind the new ATi flagship model. The main reason for ATi’s lead is the card’s 256-bit memory interface, which effectively doubles its memory bandwidth. And that’s not counting the four vertex-shader units, compared to the GeForce4 Ti’s two, giving a real boost to its polygon capabilities.

The only area where the NVIDIA chip manages to keep up is in pixel pipelines. While it only has four pixel pipelines, as opposed to the eight on the 9700 PRO, each pipeline can calculate two textures per clock and pipe. The fill rates of both cards are roughly equal for games that use multitexturing, basically translating into all current games. Matrox is another competitor, at least in a price comparison. With its vertex shader, the Matrox Parhelia offers hardware-accelerated DirectX 9 features. That said, the pixel shaders are still designed to conform to the DirectX 8.1 standard. Despite its innovative fragment antialiasing and a 256-bit memory interface, it doesn’t perform nearly as well as a GeForce4, let alone a Radeon 9700 PRO. The Parhelia’s strengths lie more in the 2D arena, such as in multi-monitor environments. It allows up to three monitors to be connected; if you want, you can spread games out to up to three monitors using the Surround Gaming feature. But the chip seems to hit a brick wall at that point: it’s nigh on impossible to play new games like Unreal Tournament 2003 in this mode because of the chip’s poor 3D capabilities.

Features

DirectX 9 allows complex shader effects to be calculated in real time. This is the first time that shaders that come into play in sophisticated film sequences have been used.

The 9700 PRO has some more competition, though somewhat closer to home. Next to the “normal” 9700 (not the PRO), it also has to struggle against the cheaper 9500 PRO and 9500 (see ATI Increases Its Lead: The New Radeon 9700, 9500 PRO and 9500).

We’ve already gone over the technical aspects of the Radeon 9700 PRO several times. We compared the card with its competition in a large performance round-up (see Preview: ATI’s All In Wonder 9700 PRO and ATi Radeon 9700 PRO – Pretender To The Throne), and explained its features and the technology that went into making it.

Complex reflection effects using the High Dynamic Range feature.

If you’re looking for a Radeon 9700 PRO card in the U.S. or Canada, you’ll have a choice between an original ATi card (sporting the label “Built by ATi”) or a card from another manufacturer (“Powered by ATi”). In all other countries, ATi leaves the retailing up to its so-called board partners, while still distributing directly to the OEM market. In this test, we examined the original ATi card as well as five other Radeon 9700 PRO boards from Crucial, Hercules, Gigabyte, HIS and Sapphire. All the boards are based on the ATi reference design. The only difference from the “original” is in the cooling, color and software. The chip and RAM clock speeds are identical on all the boards – the CPU runs at 325 MHz and the memory at 310 MHz (or “620 MHz DDR”). So there isn’t much point in comparing performance ratings – the features are the true selling points on these cards. Knowing this, we don’t list each and every card in the benchmarks. The overclocking test was the only one in which it made sense to see how the individual cards stacked up. For more information, you can read about our large performance test of the Radeon 9700 PRO (Preview: ATI’s All In Wonder 9700 PRO). Please note that the benchmarks in this test were performed on a faster test system.

In this test, we used a somewhat slower computer to reflect the fact that most people don’t have access to a powerhouse system. Many will prefer to buy a more modest CPU and invest what they save in a faster graphics card.

DirectX 9 allows effects to be calculated more precisely with floating-point calculations.

Image Quality

But first, let’s look at the cards individually. Since there are hardly any performance differences among these cards, we’ll focus on the extras. For many buyers, image quality is another main selling point; even though the boards may have the same design, there are differences caused by the varying quality of their components. After all, these cards weren’t all made in the same factory. To compare image quality, we hooked up two IBM P260 20″ monitors to the cards and assessed image quality for both monitor ports at 1280×1024@85Hz and 1600×1200@75Hz. Please note that the cards may produce considerably better or worse images with different monitors.

The results reflect a subjective appraisal of the image quality displayed by the test monitors. Results may vary considerably with other models (see text).

And there’s the rub. Since each manufacturer and monitor transforms the analog VGA signals differently, it’s hard to derive conclusions from measurements of the cards’ output signals. You can measure certain indicators and the edge steepness, but that won’t reveal much about the display quality with your particular monitor. In fact, some monitors even have problems with edge steepness levels that are too high. The only way to be absolutely sure of your purchase is to check the display quality with your own monitor. Of course, you’ll first have to find a store that installs the card in a test computer and allows people to bring their own monitors. And that’s an almost impossible task, considering the influence of the Internet on shopping habits and the tendency to focus on low prices and gloss over sales advice. Anyway, it’s about time that creaky analog transmission was dumped and that CRT monitors were only controlled digitally. The digital input could be converted to analog within the monitor and optimized for its picture tube. Some monitors already use this design.

What These Elite Candidates Have in Common

Drivers

On its website, ATi differentiates between original ATi cards (Built by ATi = BBA) and third-party boards (Powered by ATi = PBA). That said, you can still operate all the cards using the BBA Catalyst drivers. The driver allows you to make numerous 3D settings for Direct3D and OpenGL. You’ll quickly be able to find your way around the different options in the settings menu. Right-clicking on any of the settings will bring up a small help window explaining the feature.

Settings menu for Direct3D options.

The only sour point was the difficulty in setting the refresh rate in the driver’s display menu. When you change resolutions, the driver will automatically overwrite your settings for the maximum refresh rate. It remains a mystery to us why you have to first set the maximum refresh rate for a resolution in the ATi display menu, then change the resolution “manually” in order to set the refresh rate in the standard Windows monitor menu. And if you are running several monitors at once, you’ll have go through the entire process again for each monitor. And you get to do it all over again if you want to change your resolution. ATi really ought to find a way to offer all these settings in one easy-to-use menu.

Settings menu for OpenGL options.

Also, the driver conspicuously lacks a refresh-rate fix so that you can set your refresh rate higher than 60 Hz in games under Windows 2000 and Windows XP (below SP1). This feature is supposed to be included in future drivers.

Setting the refresh rate is incredibly complicated (see text).

Multimedia Bundle Software

The approach taken with the software is also somewhat confusing. Crucial includes the ATi MultiMedia Center v7.7.0.0 with the card. However, we were unable to get any picture from a DVD with this version and with Catalyst v2.03.

After installing the MMC, the desktop suddenly has a new quick-start bar that you can also deactivate, if you so desire.

Neither the manufacturers nor ATi offer updates for the MMC. The only update we found was a v7.0.0.1 on ATi’s website. As expected, it didn’t work together with the 9700 PRO. Perhaps this is the reason why Hercules, HIS and Gigabyte preferred to ship their cards with PowerDVD. This player software has no difficulties playing DVDs. Once we brought these problems to ATi’s attention, they sent us a complete version of MultiMedia Center v7.7.8.0 that played DVDs flawlessly.

Hydravision

Hydravision gives you many options for spreading your windows out across several monitors.

ATi’s counterpart to NVIDIA’s nView is called Hydravision. This software manages your windows when the card is operated with two monitors. For example, you can specify the monitor in which an application or its window messages should appear. The window bar is expanded to include several buttons that permit you to maximize a window in both or in one monitor, with just one click. The software ships with all the cards except Gigabyte and HIS. It’s hard to fathom why these two choose not to include the software, especially since they both include the DVI-to-VGA adapter you need for the multi-monitor display. Be that as it may, you can still download Hydravision from ATi, so even owners of these cards can use the multi-monitor feature.

You can make individual settings for each application.

TV-Out

ATi integrated the TV-out functions in the 9700 PRO’s 3D chip. Thanks to its two RAMDACs, you can set different resolutions for your monitor and TV. If you go to DOS mode while the TV cable is connected, though, the card will inexplicably switch to another resolution. If you connect the cable under Windows, the output will work immediately, i.e., without any reboot. The ATi driver will still try to reboot, though.

TV-Out settings.

But there are more serious problems. The driver does not have a function that allows you to run a TV and a monitor in clone mode (when both screens show the same picture) once you have set different resolutions for the two output devices. In that case, the TV-out will always assume the resolution settings of the primary display. The maximum TV resolution is 1024×768. Any higher, and you’ll have to pan back and forth on your desktop. The only way the driver will let you select between 640×480 and 1024×768 is by expanding the desktop to the second monitor.

The display size can be set for the TV. Vertical panning is still problematic.

Operating the TV-out with two monitors is rather complicated. Once the TV-out is activated, the second monitor shuts down. The TV will not show the TV display until the computer has been rebooted, although the driver doesn’t give you a message telling you this. Since the TV is treated like a second display, you will first have to redo all the settings, including clone mode – not exactly what you would call convenient. At least you can save different display schemes in the driver’s display menu, although it would be better if ATi were to supply the driver with the most common ones. Things start getting really tricky when you try to run the primary display from the secondary monitor port. It makes it impossible to get any TV output. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find out what happens to the TV output when you operate a TFT from the DVI output port (which is also the second monitor output port) because we didn’t have a display for it.

Flicker filter and sharpness settings.

Although a little blurry, the TV display is fine. We tested the PAL mode in composite. No matter how much we fiddled with the resizing options, we inevitably ended up with a black bar above and below the picture. The vertical resizing function appears to have no effect on the TV picture. The theater mode of the overlay mode, which recognizes a video picture and automatically converts the TV output to full-screen, is defective: it didn’t work with the PowerDVD software. The bar is still present in overlay mode.

The Cards, Up Close & Personal

ATi Radeon 9700 PRO

Original/ “Built by ATi” graphics cards are available in the U.S. and Canada. In Europe and in other countries, the Canadians only deliver their “bulk” versions to the OEM market.

The reference.

Back of the card.

The ATi board defines the reference design that is the basis for all the other cards. ATi throws in the mandatory power cable to operate the card, a DVI-VGA adapter to connect a second CRT monitor, and an S-VHS and composite cable that can be connected to the board via an adapter. The only software ATi includes is the complete Catalyst driver suite with Hydravision and the MultiMedia Center, which, in turn, contains a DVD player; rather slim pickings, considering the premium you pay in comparison to the third-party cards.

• Plus points:
  
  Original ATi board with ATi support
  
  Multimedia Center incl. DVD player
  
  Hydravision

• Minus points:
  
  Most expensive card in test
  
  Puny software bundle
  
  Only available in the U.S. and Canada

Crucial Radeon 9700 PRO

The American manufacturer Crucial is known mostly for its enormous selection of memory products, including DRAM and Compact Flash modules. It recently added ATi-based graphics cards to its assortment.

The only thing that distinguishes this board from the ATi reference card is the sticker on the fan.

Crucial ships the card in a humdrum white box; an understandable move, since the cards can only be ordered online anyway, and bright packaging would merely rack up unnecessary costs. Except for the company’s logo on the fan, the card is a twin of the ATi original design. Don’t bother looking for a comprehensive manual – Crucial just includes a small leaflet explaining how to install the card. The board ships with a power adapter, a composite cable (1.90 m) with adapter, an S-VHS cable (1.80 m), and a DVI-VGA adapter.

The back of the card.

Like ATi, Crucial supplies a modest software package – a driver CD that also contains the MultiMedia Center with the DVD player and Hydravision. While this is a solid bundle overall, it, like the original ATi card, doesn’t offer too many extras.

The fan offers adequate cooling power.

• Plus points:
  
  Multimedia Center incl. DVD player
  
  Hydravision
  
  Good support website with card-related instructions and FAQs

• Minus points:
  
  Puny software bundle

Gigabyte Maya II GV-R9700 PRO

The Taiwanese manufacturer Gigabyte produced graphics cards based on NVIDIA chips for a long time before switching entirely to ATi at the beginning of the year.

Chic gold-plated heatsinks keep the temperatures down.

Interestingly, Gigabyte did not install memory coolers on the back of the card.

While still based on the ATi reference design like the other cards, the Maya II board has a differently designed, gold-plated fan and cooling elements for its RAM. Interestingly, these elements are only integrated on the front of the card, indicating that they may only be decorative. Gigabyte is somewhat tight-fisted with the video accessories, including only a combined S-VHS/ composite cable and a composite adapter. A DVI-VGA adapter and a manual are the only other items in the package.

The fan design is identical to that of the ATi reference card.

Close-up of the memory coolers.

Gigabyte includes a comprehensive software bundle with the card, albeit without Hydravision. Instead of the MultiMedia Center, the board ships with the DVD player PowerDVD XP 4.0 from Cyberlink. The game bundle consists mostly of titles from days gone by – Serious Sam, Rune, Heavy Metal FAKK2, Motocross Mania and the light versions of Evo 4×4 and Oni.

• Plus points:
  
  Cyberlink Power DVD XP
  
  Large gaming bundle, albeit with somewhat older titles

• Minus points:
  
  No Hydravision dual-display software
  
  RAM heatsinks only on the front of the card
  
  No video-out cable (see text)

Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 PRO

Like Gigabyte, Hercules had long been an NVIDIA partner before joining the ATi camp after the GeForce3 generation. Hercules is also ATi’s exclusive partner for Europe.

Hercules tints the board its usual blue.

A small heatsink on the back of the card dissipates even more heat from the R300 chip.

The 3D Prophet 9700 PRO is also based on the ATi reference design. The standard Hercules blue, which sets the PCB off from the other cards, has a slightly greenish cast on this board. A powerful copper cooler is integrated on the card, keeping the R300 properly chilled. The heat produced by the chip is also dissipated by a small heatsink glued onto the back of the card. Small heatsinks have also been glued onto all eight memory modules. The packet includes a DVI-VGA adapter, as well as a combination S-VHS/ composite cable that is a little short at 1.40 m. The board also ships with an S-VHS/ composite adapter.

Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 PRO, Continued

A powerful copper cooler keeps the GPU frigid.

A close-up of a memory cooler.

The chip cooler on the back of the card.

The installation CD contains drivers as well as several ATi 3D demos, Hercules’ own tweak tool, 3D Tweaker, and the Hydravision software for dual displays. Hercules has also opted for PowerDVD XP 4.0 instead of the ATi MultiMedia Center. But the real morsel in this package is the full version of Morrowind, a game that will really put the new card to the test.

Hercules includes its own overclocking tool.

• Plus points:
  
  Cyberlink Power DVD XP
  
  Hydravision
  
  Hercules 3D overclocking software
  
  Gaming bundle with the latest hit, Morrowind
  
  ATi 3D Demos
  
  Attractive appearance with blue PCB and RAM coolers
  
  Chip heatsink on the back of the card
  
  Comprehensive manual

• Minus points:
  
  Video cable somewhat short

HIS Excalibur Radeon 9700 PRO

HIS, established in 1987, stands for “Hightech Information System LTD.” The company is based in Hong Kong. HIS used to produce many cards based on NVIDIA chips, but switched camps, like Hercules and Gigabyte, after the GeForce3 generation.

Only the small sticker on the VGA-out reveals who the manufacturer is.

Except for the HIS sticker on the VGA-out, the Excalibur 9700 PRO is identical to the ATi reference card. HIS ships the board with a 1.80 m S-VHS and composite cable with an adapter and a DVI-VGA adapter to connect a second CRT monitor. A manual offers a quick introduction to installing the hardware and software.

The back of the card.

HIS also chooses not to include ATi’s MultiMedia Center, and bundles the card with the DVD player PowerDVD XP 4.0 from Cyberlink. The software package is rounded off with the video-editing software PowerDirector 2.1VE from Cyberlink and the game Ballistics. The board also comes with Hydravision.

• Plus points:
  
  Cyberlink Power DVD XP
  
  Hydravision
  
  Gaming bundle: Ballistics
  
  Manual

Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis PRO

The Hongkong-based producer Sapphire is a close partner of ATi in the manufacture of graphics cards. The Sapphire boards are made in China.

100% ATi reference design, except for the fan.

The back of the card.

Except for the fan, the Atlantis PRO is based completely on the ATi reference design. Earlier versions of the card are still available with the original ATi fan. The version tested here uses another fan that Sapphire claims cools better. The remaining accessories consist of video cables (S-VHS and composite + adapter, each 1.80 m) and a DVI-VGA adapter. A manual is included to guide you through the installation.

A close-up of the fan. According to Sapphire, this model cools much better than the ATi fan.

The installation CD contains the Catalyst drivers and Hydravision, as well as ATi’s MultiMedia Center, this time without the standard ATi DVD player. Instead, Sapphire includes Cyberlink’s PowerDVD XP 4.0.

• Plus points:
  
  Hydravision
  
  Multimedia Center (without DVD)
  
  Cyberlink PowerDVD XP 4.0

• Minus points:
  
  No games bundled

Benchmarks

Since the cards are identical, except for the cooling and colors, and run at the same clock speeds, we decided to skip time-consuming individual tests and just determined the ratings with the reference card. When it came to the overclocking tests, though, we gave each card an opportunity to strut its stuff. To give an idea of how the Radeon 9700 PRO performs, we’ve compared it to the “small” Radeon 9700, the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4400 and 4600, and to the equally expensive Matrox Parhelia.

Max Payne

In Max Payne, the Radeon 9700 PRO is at the head of the pack. The Matrox Parhelia is left far behind.

Aquanox

The tests in Aquanox garner similar results. The Radeon 9700 PRO is head and shoulders above the rest.

Unreal Tournament 2003

The GeForce4 Ti cards can still keep up in 1024×768. When resolutions get higher, the Radeon 9700 PRO comes out on top – at least in terms of the average frame rate. The NVIDIA boards are the winners in terms of minimum frame rates, i.e., the highest-lowest performance attained during a test run. Matrox’s Parhelia brings up the rear again.

Jedi Knight II

The results are very close in the CPU-intensive Jedi Knight II benchmark. The Parhelia makes a good showing here, too.

3D Mark 2001 SE b330

The synthetic benchmark 3D Mark 2001 has the ATi cards far ahead of the rest. NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti boards are not as far behind in this test as in the game tests.

FSAA tests

The Matrox Parhelia ran with 16x fragment AA.

The Radeon 9700 cards benefit from their high memory bandwidth in 4xFSAA. The Radeon 9700 PRO is almost twice as fast as a GeForce4 Ti4600.

Anisotrope Filtering

Matrox Parhelia only offers 2x anisotropic.

ATi plays its trump card in anisotropic filtering. Unlike NVIDIA, ATi doesn’t filter all textures using the specified filter level; instead, it decides how much to filter the texture depending on the angle of the texture to the viewer. NVIDIA has accused ATi of increasing performance to the detriment of quality. In reality, though, it’s hard to spot any differences. Intriguingly, ATi has recently added “adaptive” to the list of adjectives describing its filter technology. Because the Matrox Parhelia is unable to filter 8x anisotropic, it was tested with a lower quality level (2x). It was still the laggard of the group.

FSAA + Anisotrope Filtering

Matrox Parhelia ran with 16x fragment AA and 2x anisotropic (maximum level possible).

This test reflects the highest quality achievable in the real world. As expected, Radeon 9700 managed to consolidate its lead from the individual tests. The GeForce4 Ti cards fell off a cliff in this discipline; even at 1024×768, the games are almost unplayable with the NVIDIA chip. Please note that these results only show the average frame rate!

Overclocking Tests

Overclocking tests are problematic by nature, since chip and RAM quality are extremely erratic. While all the manufacturers send regular production boards to the lab, it’s hard to tell whether the purchaser of such a card will receive a model that has “better” or “worse” chips. Of course, running the cards at the default clock is not a problem. Overclocking, however, pushes the components to their limits, which may be higher, depending on the production lot. On the other hand, the workmanship of the board also plays a role.

The results obtained in this discipline are not strictly binding, but they are a good indicator of what to expect. That said, the passive RAM coolers installed on some of the cards appear to have a mostly decorative function, although it certainly can’t hurt to keep the temperature of the memory chips somewhat lower. Since the original ATi card is a pre-production version, we’ve decided not to test it. Any results wouldn’t have any bearing on the actual production versions. We would like to note, however, that the card ran stably up to 400/ 340.

We have not added any comments to the results for the reasons mentioned above. Note: the overclocking tests were performed with ATi Catalyst v02.3, since v02.4 was not available when the OC tests were performed. Since the new version enhances performance considerably, the values listed here are somewhat lower than the results published earlier in the article.

Conclusion

All the cards in this test are based on the ATi reference design. All the cards have the same clock speed, making it impossible for any one of them to outdo its brethren. Even the hardware accessories are, by and large, very similar to one another. The only differences are in the software. If you’re interested in a large game bundle, the Gigabyte Maya II GV-R9700 PRO may be the card for you. Hercules’ 3D Prophet 9700 PRO has a striking design and a real sweetener in the current gaming hit Morrowind. HIS’ software bundle is nothing to sneeze at, either. HIS and Sapphire take the cake in display quality.

If you can live without visual extras and game bundles, you’ll be more than happy with Crucial, Gigabyte, Sapphire and ATi. As always, the main selling points for the cards include the price and the availability in stores. None of the cards was particularly bad. Radeon 9700 PRO cards offer the best 3D performance money can buy right now, assuming you have a fast CPU. So there’s not much you can do wrong. The software is the only area that still has some room to expand. The TV-out and dual-monitor management functions have not been properly realized in ATi’s core driver. This is an area ATi desperately needs to improve in order to make using the cards much easier.