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ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card |
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Visual Quality, Overclocking, Conclusions
Visual Quality
I'm going to swim against the stream here and say I don't really understand the fuss about ATI's visual quality. ATI zealots have always claimed a sacrifice in performance is worth it when you see the visual quality ATI deliver. Well, I've been swapping the GF4 Ti4600 and R9700 cards in and out of various machines and testing in various benchmarks - and I stare at a GF3 in my desktop PC all day - and I don't really see a huge difference. I played BattleField 1942 for an hour or so on each - it's a tough job, yes - and again nothing really leaped out and made me go "wow, this is much better than the other one". This is on a very sharp IBM P70 monitor and my less sophisticated AOC 19" screen. Comparative screenshots with zoomed-in sections would no doubt identify differences, but in terms of real-world usage I don't think it's that much of an issue any more. The GF2's were famous for fuzziness caused by their RF filter circuitry, but on more modern cards the quality is good enough that buying a card specifically for a step up in visual quality seems to me to be excessive.
Anti-Aliasing I'll grant you is a whole different ballgame, and a detailed comparison of the various types offered by the two cards would no doubt produce a wealth of comparative screenshots and benchmark results. However, that warrants an entire article and is beyond the scope of this performance-oriented review.
Speaking of performance..
Overclocking
ATI's drivers don't provide the ability to overclock the core or memory speeds of the adapter, unlike the coolbits method secreted away in most versions of nVIDIA's drivers. No matter, Entech's PowerStrip supports the R9700 and the free/demo version lets you overclock the card.
On the KT333/XP1600+ testbed, the default 3DMark2001SE score was 11385. The core started to show "snowing" in the Nature tests at 350MHz, so 349 was the highest I considered stable. This bumped the score to 11459. Returning that to the default 325MHz and bumping the RAM speed up resulted in texture flashes at about 335MHz DDR. 333MHz, up from the default 310MHz (630MHz DDR), was the highest stable and returned a score of 11441. Both core and RAM overclocked to 349/333 resulted in a score of 11543. Not particularly impressive, being literally only a few percent above the default score.
Bearing in mind that the card runs very hot even at default clockspeed, it's difficult to recommend overclocking this card unless you have a hefty aftermarket cooler. The back of the card, under the GPU core, is already too warm to rest your finger on for more than a second or so. Bumping the speed up only makes this worse and doesn't earn you any great speed advantage - and it's already a stupendously fast card even at stock speed.
Conclusions
Well, I wouldn't say my experience with ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro has been entirely smooth sailing - this review took quite a bit longer than I'd hoped, due to reinstalling testbeds etc. However, taking a step back and looking overall, it's an impressive feat from ATI to steam past nVIDIA's flagship product. In high resolutions the Radeon 9700 Pro is all-conquering and that seems destined to continue after DirectX 9 arrives. nVIDIA's NV30 is on the way of course, but with hazy release dates it could be a while off yet. The R9700 has some driver issues that ATI need to fix and AGP8X support is questionable, but in terms of sheer grunt you can't fault it. It's been a good while since anyone other than nVIDIA could lay claim to the fastest video card on the market, but right now ATI have the crown. All hail the new king!
Review unit kindly provided by Plus Corporation.
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