A Roundup of ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video cards
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Introduction
NVIDIA's produce reigned over the market of video cards for a relatively long time. The former king, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4800, ruled for about six months and things ended up in that testing the GeForce4 Ti became absolutely uninteresting - the Radeon 8500, ATI's most powerful 3D accelerator that time, was losing to GeForce4 Ti completely, so the Ti(tanic) had no real competitor. But things radically changed with the release of ATI's revolutionary chip R300 and Radeon 9700 PRO built on its base. That video card featured options and power unparalleled that time - Radeon 9700PRO offered 8 pixel pipelines, 256-bit memory interface and support for DirectX 9. Besides, the anisotropic filtering implementation was remade seriously with the quality essentially improved as compared to Radeon 8500.
It's just with the release of Radeon 9700 PRO when revolution came about - the king's throne of 3D accelerators was taken over by this ATI video card.
Then came the release of the GeForce FX5800 Ultra, NVIDIA's long lasting piece of development. The card was so immensely anticipated, but it turned out to be extremely faulty - the operating frequencies were almost twice as high than in the Radeon 9700 PRO with the performance staying at about the former level and even lower at some tests. On top of it all, GeForce FX 5800 Ultra offered the roaring FX Flow cooling system and was strongly getting on the nerves of those present in the same room with GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.
A transition to the 0.13 mk process technology took place, and engineers at NVIDIA presumably had something going wrong - despite the improved process technology the heat emission was noticeably higher than in the Radeon 9700 PRO, so a regular cooler was no longer enough for the new video card which required a much more powerful cooling system.
That video card proved to be the most short-lived for the whole history of the industry, that is why an announcement of the new card, GeForce FX 5900, took place urgently.
ATI reacted with R350 and Radeon 9800 PRO built on its base. So these cards we'll be the focus of today's roundup.
Specifications
ATI is positioning two models of the Radeon 9800 PRO card on the hi-end market:
- Radeon 9800 PRO 128 MB DDR, with the chip/memory frequencies 380/380 MHz
- Radeon 9800 PRO 256 MB DDR-II, with the chip/memory frequencies 380/700 MHz.
At its specifications, the R350 neither makes much difference from its predecessor, R300, nor offers any radical changes. The clock speeds have been raised, with some optimization to the drivers and some small architectural innovations added.
R350
The F-buffer proved to be the major innovation. This technology offers hardware support for the execution of shader having unlimited length through partitioning them into pieces. Use of this technology gives some performance boost in shader-enabled applications.
By and large, the R350 is simply a polished and optimized version of the R300, even the quantity of transistors in the chip remained the same. There aren't any essential technological distinctions from the predecessor chip.
The main specifications of Radeon 9800 PRO and its predecessor Radeon 9700 PRO are gathered in the following table:
|
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro |
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro |
| Chip technology |
256 bit |
256 bit |
| Process technology |
0.15 mk |
0.15 mk |
| Memory bus |
256 bit DDR |
256 bit DDR |
| AGP bus |
1x/2x/4x/8x |
1x/2x/4x/8x |
| Memory |
128/256 MB |
128 Mb |
| Chip clock speed |
380 MHz |
325 MHz |
| Memory speed |
340 MHz (680 DDR) |
310 MHz (620 DDR) |
| Memory packaging |
BGA |
BGA |
| Q-ty of vertex shader blocks |
4 |
4 |
| Pixel pipelines |
8 |
8 |
| Texture units per pipeline |
1 |
1 |
| Textures per texture unit |
8 |
8 |
| Vertex shader version |
2.0 |
2.0 |
| Pixel shader version |
2.0 |
2.0 |
| DirectX version |
9.0 |
9.0 |
| FSAA type |
Multisampling |
Multisampling |
| Memory optimization |
Hyper Z III+ |
Hyper Z III |
| Q-ty of monitor outputs |
2 |
2 |
| Internal RAMDAC |
2 x 400 MHz |
2 x 400 MHz |
| Bits per color channel |
10 |
10 |
PCB design
In producing boards on the base of Radeon 9700 PRO, all the video cards manufacturers used the same "reference" PCB design. This is because of the complexity of developing own eight-layered PCB (e.g., most motherboards offer a 6-layered PCB) for the Radeon 9700PRO and high costs incurred in developing such a PCB. Just imagine - the R350 chip features around 1000 pins which need to be wired. Manufacturers simply and unpretentiously made use of ATI's reference design, and the exterior of video cards supplied by various manufacturers differed in only the cooling system, rarely by the color of the PCB.
Things didn't change with the release of the Radeon 9800 PRO - the PCB design didn't turn simpler, and the manufacturers didn't want to take any trouble - another assault of the clones came up, the way it was with the Radeon 9700 PRO.
The PCB design of the Radeon 9800 PRO 128 MB slightly differs from that of the Radeon 9700 PRO 128 MB - for the most part the differences are about supply circuits, which are now cooled better, and some other unimportant board's components. The PCB design hasn't been reworked radically albeit quite noticeably - at least the PCB remake is well seen to the naked eye.
The PCB of the 256 MB DDR-II offers more design changes to do with the doubling of memory chips as well as the specific features of the DDR-II memory, extremely sensitive to induction.
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