ATI Radeon 9700

[P-Dub]

The new king of the video cards has arrived:

Here's a brief summary:

• 0.15-micron GPU
• 110+ million transistors
• 8 pixel rendering pipelines, 1 texture unit per pipeline, can do 16 textures per pass
• 4 programmable vect4 vertex shader pipelines
• 256-bit DDR memory bus
• up to 256MB of memory on board, clocked at over 300MHz (resulting in a minimum of 19.2GB/s of memory bandwidth)
• AGP 8X Support
• Full DX9 Pixel and Vertex Shader Support
• Single Full Speed 165MHz integrated TMDS transmitter

Should be shipping in the next 30 days and will retail for US$399.



Read all about it here: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1656




Paul

There are three kinds of people in this world; those that can count, and those that can't.

[SiliGoose]

Impressive real world improvements over nVidia's monster. Still, it's only a matter of months before nVidia leapfrogs ATI yet again.




-Sili

[Trevor Schell]

Time to upgrade! :boohoo:




Trevor
My HomeTheater S.E.
Sonically Enhanced
C5

[JonMarsh]

I have to wonder if it isn't really a shame they took out all the good DVD/MPEG related hardware on this puppy- now, it will rely on software decoders and stuffing the video into the 3D pipeline- at least through the "video shaders", that's what I've read at Tom's and others. This feature will allow smoothing and nicer looking low res sources when working with AVI files, Real Video (what an oxymoron!), but clearly, ATI has decided the focus is on Internet streaming video and the like, not DVD/HDTV playback. From a business viewpoint, I understand- a lot more people will use streaming video on their PC- someday - when they go broadband. Me, I think so called streaming video even on DSL is a joke. Seeing the hardware IDCT decoding ditched and DVD playback relagated to software drivers (this is ATI we're talking about here, the equivalent of Lucas Prince of Darkness when it comes to drivers) disspoints me greatly.

On the other hand, their new 9000 series offers an improved version of the orignal video architecture, "Video Immersion II",

ATI’s VIDEO IMMERSION™ II technology integrates industry-leading digital video features, including advanced adaptive de-interlacing algorithm, temporal filtering, and video gamma enhancement for unprecedented video quality and integrated digital TV decode capability. In addition, there is component output support for HDTVs (High Definition Television) at 480i, 480p, 720p and 1080i.

so for the HTPC buffs among us, this may be the series to look at. I may replace my older VE on the desktop with one of these.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....