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Originally published at Internet.comYour First Look at the New Graphics Leader
How serious is ATI Technologies Inc. about retaking the PC graphics lead from Nvidia Corp.? Well, the Radeon 8500 announced last August and shipped last October is no longer the company's top of the line. In fact, it's no longer in the line.
While older Radeon 7000 and 7500 cards will still be available for bargain hunters, ATI introduced today a fully DirectX 8.1-compatible Radeon 9000 and 9000 Pro for the under-$150 mainstream, and next month will ship a startlingly powerful graphics processor for the $399 game-maniac market: the DirectX 9-compliant, 256-bit, 2.6-gigapixels-per-second Radeon 9700, which ATI brags is more than twice as fast as Nvidia's flagship GeForce4 Ti 4600 in high-resolution (1,600 by 1,200) benchmarks ranging from Serious Sam to 3DMark 2001.
To get the bad news out of the way, Hardware Central and hardcore sister site Sharky Extreme can neither back nor debunk that with hands-on testing at this hour: The first Radeon 9000s (formerly codenamed RV250) are leaving the factory today, while the 9700 (nee R300) won't leave the labs till August -- at, ATI execs promise, a core speed of 325MHz or maybe a bit more. Versions with ATI's All-in-Wonder TV-viewing and video-recording functions, and a slightly less racy and costly 9700 variant called Radeon 9500, will be along in the fourth quarter of this year.
The internet.com sites did, however, receive a private briefing earlier this month, so we're able to share the scoop. Let's begin with the 9000 (250MHz core, 400MHz memory) and 9000 Pro (275MHz core, 550MHz memory), which you can expect to see very soon in cards from half a dozen third-party vendors like Gigabyte and Hercules/Guillemot, as well as in ATI's own $149 Radeon 9000 Pro board with 64MB of DDR. This graphics processing unit (GPU), the company says, is 20 to 75 percent quicker than Nvidia's mainstream GeForce4 MX 440, while delivering the complete DirectX 8.1 hardware support that chip lacks.
Quad-Pipe Pixel Shaders for John Q. Public
According to ATI, by Christmas there'll be over 100 PC games on the market that use DirectX 8.1's vertex and pixel shaders (GPU rather than CPU programming routines that control how 3D objects are rendered and how their surfaces appear on screen), and the Radeon 9000 is the first mainstream-priced graphics accelerator to offer programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware.
Specifically, the AGP 4X-compatible chip incorporates four parallel rendering pipelines ("Quad-Pipe 3D" will be the marketing slogan) -- twice as many as the GeForce4 MX. And while the latter chip lacks the GeForce4 Ti's nfiniteFX II shader engine, the 9000 has DirectX 8.1 vertex shader 1.1 and pixel shader 1.4 support built in. Like the Radeon 8500, the 9000 can apply six textures per rendering pass.
But the pixel shaders aren't just for 3D, adds ATI: A feature called Fullstream applies them in real time to enhance Internet streaming video. The Radeon 9000 makes video look less blocky by smoothing edges and blending pixels at the boundary of each macroblock; it doesn't turn streaming video into DVD quality or anywhere near it, but it does make a visible difference and permit video-clip viewing in a larger window with less pixelation.
Though it's an affordable board (ATI says it's in the "performance mainstream," with the Radeon 7500 in the "value mainstream"), the 9000 Pro matches the 8500's Hydravision dual-display technology -- everything from the easy setup wizards and desktop management utilities to dual 400MHz DACs and 165MHz TMDS support for 1,920 by 1,200-pixel flat-panel displays -- as well as 1,024 by 768-resolution TV-out integrated into the GPU itself. ATI's $149 board includes DVI-I, VGA, and TV-out ports.
Again, ATI doesn't pretend the Radeon 9000 Pro will blow the doors off a GeForce4 Ti -- in our briefing, we couldn't help notticing the "20 to 75 percent faster in in-house tests" claim applied to the GeForce4 MX 440, so we expect real-world 3D performance comparable to Nvidia's step-up GeForce4 MX 460. But the ATI product seems far more future-proof or up-to-date; its greatest value is in bringing DirectX 8.1 functionality to the under-$150 market -- which, in turn, dwarfs the potential audience for any of the $400 gonzo cards that game addicts argue over today.
What's that you say? You're one of those gonzo gamers, and you've got $399 in your pocket (and an unused floppy-drive power connector in your PC)? Well, turn the page
Render Me This: The Radeon 9700
Microsoft isn't expected to release DirectX 9 until at least October, and PCs with AGP 8X (doubling the 1.0GB/sec bandwidth of AGP 4X) won't be common until next year. So it's hard to get too worked up about the fact that ATI won't ship its Radeon 9700 board until the second half of August, but it's easy to get excited about what it means: brilliant-quality 2D with 3D benchmark scores toppling the GeForce4 Ti 4600, yes, but also scenes of Final Fantasy- or Monsters Inc.-quality realism never before seen on the PC.
In fact, ATI's product managers sound proudest when describing how the Radeon 9700 can render scenes or run shaders and effects created for movies -- programs of any length, written (given the right compiler) in any language such as Pixar's RenderMan, not scaled-down versions with fewer polygons -- even if it takes multiple passes or slows to 0.1 frame per second. The point, they say, is that those jobs used to involve hitting the "Render" button and waiting an hour, even with a farm of CPUs, so even 10 seconds to render such a frame on a desktop PC is, well, mind-boggling.
The key is DirectX 9.0, which vaults from version 1.1 of Microsoft's vertex shaders and 1.4 of pixel shaders to version 2.0 of both (along with adding sci-fi features like displacement mapping to simultaneously smooth out and add detail to textured surfaces). Instead of being limited to 128 instructions, a DirectX 9.0 vertex shader can have 1,024, with a maximum of 256 constants instead of 96. A pixel shader can have 16 texture maps instead of 6, with 160 texture instructions.
Most important, instead of integer-only data with 48-bit precision, DirectX 9.0 crunches floating-point numbers with 128-bit precision. Without getting swamped in the math, let's just say that allows the same scene to contain both brighter sunshine and darker shadows -- a smooth spectrum of a million brightness levels, instead of the ratchety 255 available with today's 32-bit color (which leaves just 8 bits for a pixel's alpha or brightness value after allowing 8 apiece for its red, green, and blue color information).
In terms of 2D, the Radeon 9700 -- like the Parhelia-512 that Matrox Graphics introduced recently -- jumps from 8 to 10 bits per channel, broadening the color palette from 16.7 million to approximately a billion colors. In terms of 3D, well, this thing is a monster.
The 0.15-micron-process GPU has 107 million transistors (nearly double the 55 million of Intel's 0.13-micron Pentium 4 CPU). "Octo-Pipe" doesn't have the jazzy sound that "Quad-Pipe" does, but it has eight parallel pixel rendering pipelines, with four vertex shader engines capable of handling 16 textures per pass.
It combines four independent 64-bit memory channels into a 256-bit memory interface (for DDR today, but ready for DDR-II tomorrow) offering memory bandwidth of 20GB/sec. And at 325MHz, it pumps out 325 million triangles or 2.6 gigapixels per second. As the ATI-supplied table above shows, that knocks the quad-pipe GeForce4 Ti into a cocked hat.
ATI says the Radeon 9700's anisotropic filtering is a tad better than the 8500's, but the real improvement work went into its Smoothvision 2.0 antialiasing, which switches from the 8500's supersampling to a more Nvidia-like multisampling (focusing on smoothing edges, not a whole image). ATI says Matrox's Parhelia does something similar, but its "fragment antialiasing" doesn't always detect edges correctly, and it doesn't have Smoothvision 2.0's secret weapon -- gamma correction to soften color gradients.
If you think the Radeon 9000's Fullstream sounds nice, prepare to be dazzled by the 9700's Videosshader -- a similar scheme of using pixel shaders for video acceleration, but with the horsepower to not only make video clips look less blocky but to perform real-time noise removal or edge outlining (useful for green-screen special effects), or even to apply an Adobe Photoshop-style filter such as embossing to real-time video.
When ATI's $399 Radeon 9700 board ships, it'll have something besides 128MB of DDR onboard -- the mega-mighty GPU requires more power than the AGP bus can reliably provide, so the AGP 4X/8X-compatible card has an ATX external connector with provided adapter for a floppy drive or other power hookup. Along with full support for both DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL, it'll offer one analog VGA, one digital flat-panel, and one S-Video (1,024 by 768-pixel TV) port.
Waiting For, But Not Obsessing About, Benchmarks
As we said, HwC and Sharky Extreme are chomping at the bit to run our own benchmarks and investigate the performance claims ATI is making -- at 1,024 by 768 resolution, according to the slide show we saw, the Radeon 9700 is 55 percent faster than the GeForce4 Ti 4600 in 3DMark 2001 and 60 percent faster in Serious Sam, with the respective advantages increasing to 113 percent and 108 percent at 1,600 by 1,200.
Frankly, however, we belong to the "we don't care about framerates in excess of our monitor's refresh" school of thought. And we know that -- while ATI deserves ample cheers and congratulations and should thoroughly enjoy the next few months' dominance -- Nvidia's own DirectX 9.0, AGP 8X, eight-pipeline product will yield similarly fantabulous numbers when it ships toward the end of this year.
What's more important is that, at last, there's no longer any real performance penalty or reason to forego image-enhancement goodies like antialiasing. And that, while the 9700 is already the quasi-official card of John Carmack's forthcoming Doom III, the games and other titles we'll be enjoying a year from now, once DirectX 9.0 has jelled, will be so cool we can't even imagine them.
Indeed, as much as the Radeon 9700 makes our jaw drop and eyes pop, we suspect the Radeon 9000 Pro will be the bigger hit -- it'll let even budget PC buyers enjoy 2002's and 2003's games, while by the time Dx9 titles go mainstream in 2004, Radeon 9700 prices will have come down. Ain't progress
Author: Eric Grevstad
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