Radeon 9800 Pro preview

[Ante P]

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 is 15.5, while the difference between the two on the 9700pro is 26.4. Is this do to the memory controller or texture filtering tweaks?

I think it's perhaps because he used different drivers for the two cards.
At first I was also using the old Cat 3.1 and I got results similar to his. Then I tried editing the inf of 7.84 and this is what I got:
http://www.nordichardware.com/reviews/graphiccard/2003/Radeon9800Pro/index.php?ez=13

 

[Ante P]

Club3d card with 2 fans. 8)

rofl now that's f'ugly

 

[Luminescent]

I was wondering if Dave also used different drivers for the 9700pro and 9800pro. This may explain some of the disparity in clock-for-clock performance.

 

[Dave Baumann]

No. As I said in the review (do people actually read it?? ) I forced the installation of the 7.84's on to the Radeon 9700 PRO.

 

[Ante P]

My name is Mr. Ass Backwards (ie why can't I delete this post?)

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Dave used the same drivers (the 9800 ones) on both boards:

The 7.84 drivers supplied by ATI are not yet WHQL certified; however, they are WHQL candidates and have been sent to Microsoft for certification, so assuming the pass then everything in this driver should be to WHQL specification. It should be noted, though, that the installation files on these drivers did not contain string for installing on Radeon 9700 PRO, and would normally only install on the newer 9800's - we managed to get the drivers to run fine on 9700 hardware by doing a manual update via the 'Add Hardware' option in the Windows Control Panel.

Overall, I'm very "satisfied" with the 9800 Pro.

The clocks are right about where I epxected them to be, even though I was hoping for something more like 400/375. However, I was not expecting such performance improvements with Aniso and AA, so that more or less makes up for it.

What is particularly amazing to me, is that this seems to be the most likely scenario near the end of March:

You walk into a store or go on-line. The fastes ATI card you can buy is a 9800 Pro. The fastest nVdia card is a Geforce4 Ti. And then a month later, it will be the GeforceFX non-ultra....

Which makes it a bit non-realistic to see all the product "shoot-outs" being the 9800 Ultra vs. The Fx Ultra. Of course, that's the real reason why nVidia even bothered to ship the Ultra in such small quantities. Exactly to prevent the 9700/9800 Pro comparisons to GeForce4 Ti and GeForceFX non-ultra.

Anyway, as I think MuFu suggested, I hope ATI decides to bump up power consumption a bit beyond what "the OEMs desire" with the 256 MB product. 400/400 would be really nice!

 

[Luminescent]

Cool, Dave, I didn't catch that.

With this in mind, the marks now seem to indicate the differences between the underclocked 9800pro and 9700pro are majorly attributed tohardware tweaking and not driver magic (unless the 9700pro is perfectly capable of running with 9800pro's ini settings and was intentionally disabled from doing so).

 

[Ante P]

(unless the 9700pro can indeed run the 9800pro's ini, with no hardware issues).

the inf has the following entry

"RADEON 9800 SERIES" ati2mtag_R300

and yeah it works properly with the R300 I tried several tests comparing the 9700 with 7.83 and 7.84 and everything seemed normal

I'l still kinda bugged by the stuttering
cat 3.0 and 3.1 was stutter free on my rig, now it's back with these latest beta drivers
can't play CS with them since it stutters to much when I try to aim :/

edit: god damn it, how come I can't spell just because I haven't slept for a few days?

 

[Luminescent]

Oh, so all your benchmarks were given with the 9700pro on the 7.34 R9800pro driver settings? Interesing...it would be nice to see the underclocked 9800pro compared to the 9700pro with the exact same driver configuration.

Edit: Sorry, I edited my post before the reply (someone here has a keen eye for the thread ).

 

[Ante P]

Did it yield increased performance with the new driver?

yeah, especially AF in UT2003 got a healthy boost
and it certainly evened out the extreme differences between Performance and Quality AF in UT2003

still the fps means nothing when it stutters so it's back to 7.83 for me

 

[Luminescent]

Dave, did you use the same driver trick as Ante P?

 

[Ante P]

Dave, did you use the same driver trick as Ante P?

same shit different toilet
the driver would be installed identically no matter if you used my or Daves method

though when I tried just forcing the driver through the device manager the control panel refused to install correctly afterwards

also smartgart doesn't seem to be included, though I could almost swear I check it out to verify that all settings were enabled when I had the 9800 Pro installed

too bad I couldn't keep it

 

[Luminescent]

same shit different toilet

Interesting way of putting it. Your reviews suddenly seem more valuable (fair) being that you tested at equal levels, even if the 9800 settings didn't go through.

 

[John Reynolds]

Did HardOCP list what AF mode they were benching with for the FX board?

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Dunno....I'm not going to read it.

 

[demalion]

Hey, ATI isn't sending this comparison chart around, are they?

Just tackling the simple stuff:

How does the Radeon 9800 offer more Displacement Mapping support than the 5800 Ultra, at all, let alone to warrant a checkmark next to it without one for the GF FX?

How does it offer more "Video Gamma Correction"?

Driver implemented Truform II for "HOS support" I guess can be stated, since nvidia has decided not to support it so far.

That's the only place I've noticed it so far, but if that's in the distributed PR material I think some 'splaining is in order!

 

[bdmosky]

I question the validity of Brent only including FX 5800 speeds. Sure, the Ultras are rare, but they are no less available at the moment than a 9800. With no official word about a cancellation from Nvidia, I think it would have been best to either include the Ultra scores or not at all and do a direct 9800 to 9700 comparison like Beyond3d. I'm sure it won't help build any bridges with Nvidia either. Oh well, just a thought...

 

[Bigus Dickus]

Bah... I just can't help it. Can anyone guess who this quote was from?

And, I will say again, it will most likely be the case that when ATI releases a DDR2 board, it will be on a 128-bit bus. Yes, there's a chance for it to be a 256-bit bus, but it would require a much more beefy memory controller or much higher core clock speeds.

 

[Evildeus]

Just to be a little bit evil (that's my name no? )

Are those drivers WHQL? Are they publicly available?

*remind me of something *

 

[Xmas]

Hey, ATI isn't sending this comparison chart around, are they?

"Maximum Texels Filtered per Pixel: 768 texels/pixel vs. 512 texels/pixel"

What are they counting here?