They’re back: ATi Technologies announces three new video board series

By SimHQ on March 6, 2003 in _technology

Introduction

If you’re a competitor of ATi’s video boards, it’s time to get worried. Not content with the success of their Radeon™ 9500 and 9700 series, ATi is announcing three new video boards today. The bar has just been raised. Again.

The three new board series include the:

Radeon™ 9800 and Radeon™ 9800 Pro for the enthusiasts market
Radeon™ 9600 and Radeon™ 9600 Pro for the performance mainstream market
Radeon™ 9200 for the mainstream market

ATi has become the first manufacturer to embraced the new OpenGL 2.0 standard in hardware with the same vigor that they surged forward with support for DirectX 9.0 and AGP 8x. If you’re running a sim that likes OpenGL, things just got more interesting. So now ATi is the only company shipping DirectX® 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0 video boards. Impressive.

ATi is also offering DirectX 9.0++ with the new boards. The extended capabilities which 9.0++ offers that are not available in 9.0 includes:

floating point 3D textures
floating point cube maps
multiple render targets
displacement mapping
n-patches

So at a time when everyone else is catching-up to ATi’s support of DirectX 9.0, they expand to 9.0++.

Some of the DirectX 9.0 sims now in development include Harpoon IV, LOMAC, Pro Race Driver, Vietcong and WWII RTS.

Meet the new Radeon™ 9800 series

Right up front, ATi says the Radeon 9800 is the fastest graphics chip in the world. Here’s how they can make that claim. The new Radeon 9800 series arrives with three memory configurations. Leading the show is the Radeon 9800 Pro – 256MB memory. That makes it the first 256MB gamer’s video board on the market. They back that up with a Radeon 9800 Pro – 128MB and a Radeon 9800 – 128MB.

Here’s a profile of each new 9800 board:

Radeon™ 9800 Pro 256MB (reference board specifications)

worlds first 256MB gamer’s video board
core: 380MHz
memory (DDR2): 340MHz DDR or 680MHz effective
full DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0 support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
256MB fast DDR2 memory
DVI, TV and CRT
available in April 2003
suggested retail price: Not yet available

Radeon™ 9800 Pro 128MB (reference board specifications)

core: 380MHz
memory: 340MHz DDR or 680MHz effective
full DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0 support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
128MB fast DDR memory
DVI, TV and CRT
available in March 2003
suggested retail price: $399

Radeon™ 9800 128MB (reference board specifications)

core: Unknown at this time
memory: Unknown at this time
full DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 2.0 support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
128MB fast DDR memory
DVI, TV and CRT
available in March 2003
suggested retail price: $349

The new Radeon™ 9600 series

Intended to open up cinematic quality imagery to a broader marketplace, ATi’s new Radeon 9600 ASIC has:

new .13 Micron micro-architecture
quad pixel pipelines (16 textures per pass, 128-bit floating point data)
dual vertex engines (up to 175 million triangles transformed and lit /sec
Hyper Z III performance optimizations include:

– 8:1 lossless Z compression
– advanced programmable Z caching
– early Z detection
– fast Z clear

hyper optimized memory controller with fully programmable bank and channel interleaving
advanced programmable visual processor:- DirectX 9.0 support with Smartshader™ 2.1: 128-bit floating point, supports standard high level shading languages, high dynamic range
– high performance quality game settings with Smoothvision™ 2.1: adaptive anisotropic filtering, up to 6x multisample anti-aliasing with gamma correction, 6:1 color compression

Here’s the 9600 boards profiles:

Radeon™ 9600 Pro 128MB (reference board specifications)

core: 400MHz
memory: 300MHz DDR or 600MHz effective
full DirectX 9.0 support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
128MB fast DDR memory
VGA, DVI and TV
Hydravision
available in April 2003
suggested retail price: $169 – $199

Radeon™ 9600 64MB – 128MB (reference board specifications)

core: 325MHz
memory: 200MHz DDR or 400MHz effective
full DirectX 9.0 support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
64MB – 128MB DDR memory
Hydravision
available in April 2003
estimated selling price: $149 – $169

…and the new Radeon™ 9200 series

The Radeon 9200 is intended to raise the mainstream market standard in video graphics quality. Featuring AGP 8x and DirectX 8.1, it’s quad-piped, has a 10-bit per color DAC and includes Smartshader™, Smoothvision™, Fullstream™. Fullstream uses ATi’s shader engine to improve Internet video playback. This results in higher quality streaming video.

Radeon™ 9200 Pro 64MB – 128MB (reference board specifications)

core: unknown at this time
memory: unknown at this time
DirectX 9.0 compatible with DirectX 8.1 shader level support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
128MB DDR memory
VGA, DVI and TV
Hydravision
available soon
estimated selling price: $129 – $179

Radeon™ 9200 64MB – 128MB (reference board specifications)

core: unknown at this time
memory: unknown at this time
DirectX 9.0 compatible with DirectX 8.1 shader level support
AGP 4x/8x compatibility
64MB – 128MB DDR memory
VGA and TV
Hydravision
available soon
estimated selling price: $79 – $129

Coming to a cinema near you

ATi has coined the term “cinematic rendering” to represent their 9700 and now the 9800 series boards. The 9800 has the only second generation cinematic video processing unit (VPU) available. Featuring a second generation cinematic architecture, the 9800 has built on their technology with Smartshader™ 2.1, Smoothvision™ 2.1 and HyperZ™ III+.

Smartshader 2.1 has unlimited instructions for the pixel shaders, and is enabled by a new “F-Buffer” technology. This results in more complex effects with improved performance.

Smoothvison 2.1 features an optimized memory controller which improves the performance in anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at higher resolutions.

Hyper Z III+ advances memory bandwidth efficiency with it’s optimized Z cache. The result is enhanced performance of shadow volumes.

Competitive comparison

Lets see how the NVIDIA® GeForceFX™ and ATi Radeon™ 9800 Pro compare.

	NVIDIA GeForceFX	ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
Memory interface	128-bit	256-bit
DirectX version support	v9.0	v9.0
OpenGL® 2.0 unlimited shader support?	no	yes
Memory bandwidth	16 GB/sec.	22.4 GB/sec.
Vertex shader instructions	65,280	65,280
Z-compression	4:1	24:1
Color compression	4:1	6:1
Maximum pixel precision	128-bit	128-bit
Maximum anisotropic filtering setting	8x	16x
Correct anti-aliasing gamma correction	no	yes
Maximum distinct anti-aliasing samples	4x	6x
Second generation 6x anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filtering	no	yes
Support for unlimited shader instructions	no	yes
Multiple rendered targets	no	yes
Full floating point processing in a single cycle	no	yes
High dimension floating point textures	no	yes

Conclusion

This kind of competition among video board manufacturers is wonderful for the consumer. We are seeing better and better quality and features than we would have ever believed possible a few years ago. It will be very interesting to see how ATi fares with their OpenGL 2.0 hardware support. While we can be amazed at the specifications, seeing is believing so we’re very anxious to get some hands-on time with “The fastest video chip in the world” and put it through the tests. Expect a review of the Radeon 9800 PRO soon.

Pictured above is a reference board picture of a VisionTek 9800 PRO powered by ATi!