Radeon 9800 Pro preview

Wow, I was blown away by the improvements over the R300. I really didn't think it could be done in such short time.

Kudos to ATI for advancing the industry in the correct direction.

 

Interesting stuff! Great preview, Ante P.

Comments:

Anyone else notice the significant relative performance benefit at 4xMSAA specifically? (Hint to Ante P--if you can, that last page with the 9700 OC'd to 9800 clocks should feature 4xMSAA tests!) I think it was UT2003 4xAA/8xAF that had 9800 at 1.5x 9700 performance, despite the 15%/10% clock increase. UT2003 high-end scores look in particular good, which is very interesting because a) it seems to be the new benchmark of choice and b) 9700/GFfx 5800 take a *huge* hit from AF and even more from AF+AA at high-res UT2003.

My speculation on all this is that 9800 in some way optimizes the framebuffer compression for 4xMSAA in particular. (My guess is that it does what I also guess NV30 does--"natively" compress at 4x using a bitmask to signal whether compression is enabled or not on a per-pixel basis.)

Also, the obvious guess for the stencil optimization is that early/Hier-Z now work in z-fail mode as well as z-pass mode, i.e. can be turned on when performing Carmack's Reverse.

Pretty impressive stuff, although the list prices are on the high side IMO.

 

Well at the very least my Bank Account's gonna be hurting (again).

 

Dave, ours appear to gone AWOL!!! :?

 

As for the price. It is exactly the same price that the 9700 Pro was launched at, $399.

 

I'm not sure about the R350 (don't have one!) so I can't answer this particular puzzling bit but I would have to assume - No... i.e. the core is still 24-bit FP per component... 96-bit *max* is written to main memory as a 128-bit value... some input/clarification from the ATI engineers on this is appreciated.

On a related note - can anyone tell me (examples appreciated) why max-fp24 would not be appreciated (compared to max-fp32 a la the NV30)? It's a personal bitch of mine re the R300, with my own reasons of course.

 

r350 is 24bit per channel
so far it is enough for everything we threw at it
i have seen spectacular examples where 32bit fp seem to fail on the same shader

 

Could you tell us what examples are those, and whether they are important (to you, with what you're referring to)?

 

reverend
get your pm

 

btw, people who can come to GDC
http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2003/4614.html
https://www.cmpevents.com/GDx/a.asp?option=C&V=11&SessID=906

cool stuff, if you dont mind my lousy english

 

What's so secret about that info?

 

nothing, i just wanted to start private discussion with Reverend

 

Beefy

 

I'm sure there are lot of people are out there who, like me, are wondering whether this card is going to be enough to play Doom III and games based on it's engine at fairly high res and fairly good quality.

It's certainly fast enough for current games, maybe even overkill, but will it be fine for the next games ? Should I whip my GF4 4400 into pulling my increasingly heavy cart just that little bit longer ?

 

Well, Anand just can't keep his head out of nVidia's....oh, well, you know:

And this suprises whom?

 

According to this page of Anand's review:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1794&p=7

the performance difference between enabling quality and performance aniso on the 9800 is not as great as doing so with the 9700. At 1280*1024 with 4x AA and 8x Aniso the difference (in fps) between quality and performance aniso is 15.5, while the difference between the two on the 9700pro is 26.4. Is this do to the memory controller tweaking or possibly increased trilinear texture filtering throughput?

 

An interesting thing, from the HardOCP numbers: Nvidia's drivers seem to be slightly less CPU heavy than ATIs. In CPU limited situations the FX always seems slightly faster (though it doesn't really make much difference, I know). Although I suppose CPU inefficiency and other driver inefficiencies are not entirely linked, based on this, it seems to me that the Nvidia driver is already pretty optimized. So, those expecting a miracle for the FX from future driver improvements, may be disappointed...

 

Club3d card with 2 fans. 8)