December 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 9700Pro 128MB DDR (325/620 MHz)

This chip is presented by Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro 128MB, AGP card.

Features:

ATI RADEON 9700 chip, 325 MHz clock rate;
128MB DDR SGRAM in 8 Samsung K4D26323RA-GC2A BGA chips. Max. clock - 350 (700) MHz, so the fetch time should be 2.8ns instead of the 2.2ns mentioned in some reviews. The default clock is 310 (620) MHz, 256-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 2600 megapixels/sec and 2600 megatexels/sec.

Overclocks to 360/700 MHz.

In July 2002 ATI Technologies announced its new the the most powerful 3D GPU - RADEON 9700. Later it became a base for ATI RADEON 9700Pro card. All details about the new 3D graphics top-model are provided in our review. Here we'll state only brief analysis results.

In general, the card is good despite the chip complexity and high temperature operation (without additional external cooling the chip heats to 85 degrees (!), and PCB - up to 68-70. Though it doesn't affect card stability (tested by 6-hour cycled 3DMark2001).
As for the card performance, we can't estimate it yet, wating for DX9 to be released (along with DX9 beta drivers).
I must note that due to some reason (perhaps, mobo BIOS) after you install ATI RADEON 9700 Pro to Soltek 75DRV5 (VIA KT333), there are only AGP 1x and 2x available (!). 4x is n/a though, the mobo works in this mode with other cards. As this card DOESN'T SEEM TO SUPPORT AGP 2x (and shouldn't support, according to AGP 3.0 specs), any 3D app locks up.
As for 3D, we can say that despite low results in synthetic tests, the general performance is very good. And 8x1 architecture will burden future resource-greedy games. But today I can tell you one thing: enabled AA and anisotropy are a must for this card! (The latter is especially good.) So, we advise all willing to pay $400 for a super card to learn about 3D graphics basics not to be afraid to enable and control 3D quality features.
After minuses (low fill rate due to 8x1, high price, low availability for the end of the summer, game artefacts), pluses, besides the general performance, are the improved anisotropic filtering support and better AA (high quality at moderate performance reduction.)

By the end of December the product belongs to the $320-340 range; supports DirectX 9.0; closest rival (if any ;-): GeForce4 Ti 4600.

On the 10th of December 2002 the latest drivers version from ATI is 6.218 for Windows XP.

Windows XP

As you can see, new versions are almost identical.

I shall note there's Radeon2.ru, web-site that tracks all software novelties from ATI and offers improved drivers versions with preset registry settings for increasing RADEON cards perfomance.

All the latest drivers belong to the CATALYST serie.

As there are currently not actual apps, using Shaders 2.0, and DirectX 9.0 hasn't been released, we'll provide some demos, based on DirectX 9.0.beta1.