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ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB & 256MB Review May 13, 2003 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: In our RADEON 9800 PRO preview, the 9800 PRO was the hands-down winner in performance and visual quality. But now NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5900 Ultra is hoping to unseat it from the throne. In today's article, we compare ATI's 128MB and 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO's to GeForce FX 5900 Ultra at stock speeds and with all three cards overclocked to the max! Does the extra memory make a difference with 6xAA and 16x anisotropic? You'll have to read the article to find out!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 18 ) |
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Designing an entirely new graphics core from the ground up is an expensive, time-consuming process that involves an extensive amount of planning, talented engineering, good timing, and a little bit of luck. Design teams can be established years in advance of shipping the final product and must rely on accurate simulators to accomplish much of their work.
Because of these factors, the introduction of a true next generation graphics core only occurs roughly once every 15 months (although this widely varies for each manufacturer); we’ve all witnessed the 24-month delay between GeForce3 and GeForce FX just recently.
To bring new products to market more quickly, interim updates are introduced. NVIDIA in particular is famous for these incremental products: the GeForce3 for example had two refreshes (the GeForce3 Titanium family and later, GeForce4) before an entirely new core was introduced in the form of GeForce FX. These updated products can range from a simple clock speed increase to a product that’s based on an enhanced design and built with a new manufacturing process.
Up until the ArtX acquisition, ATI had pretty limited experience with this business model. ATI’s Rage Fury MAXX fused two Rage Fury 128 Pro cores together, but its high price tag and mediocre performance prevented it from gaining widespread acceptance in the market. Under the direction of current President Dave Orton however, things rapidly changed. The RADEON 7500 was introduced as a follow-up to RADEON but since it launched with RADEON 8500, it wasn’t a highly visible launch. And while rumors of a RADEON 8500 refresh with higher clock speeds were rampant, RADEON 8500LE was the only product that ultimately surfaced.
Then summer 2002 arrived and ATI launched a slew of new products. On the high-end, ATI had the RADEON 9700 PRO. By now, we all know how this product turned out. ATI was first to market with 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders; RADEON 9700 PRO also boasted support of 128-bit floating-point data formats for increased precision and visual fidelity. ATI’s refresh part for the summer was the RADEON 9000 family, essentially a cost-reduced version of the RADEON 8500 that was introduced to bring DirectX 8 to the value segment of the graphics market. From top to bottom, ATI was king.
This brings us to 2003. NVIDIA still hasn’t shipped sufficient quantities of its GeForce FX 5800 family, leaving its partners to find new ways to sell what are essentially 12-month old GeForce4 products. GeForce FX 5600 and FX 5200 have just recently hit retail shelves, but until GeForce FX 5900 arrives, NVIDIA still doesn’t have a product in the high-end segment to compete with RADEON 9700 PRO. To further strengthen its position, ATI has introduced its product refresh, the RADEON 9800 PRO. The RADEON 9800 PRO boasts higher clock speeds and a few internal improvements to further increase its performance.
SIDEBAR: ATI commenced shipments of the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO yesterday.
| Specifications | Page:: ( 2 / 18 ) |
New clock speeds
The most prominent change between the RADEON 9800 PRO and the RADEON 9700 PRO are the clock speed improvements. Core clock frequency jumps from 325MHz in RADEON 9700 PRO, to 380MHz in RADEON 9800 PRO. This enhancement was made possible by optimizations to the core’s internal structure. Timings have been improved while signal integrity has been increased, allowing the core to scale to higher clock speeds without excessive noise and heat.
Meanwhile, memory has been boosted from 310MHz to 340MHz in the case of the 128MB 9800 PRO. To account for the additional latency of its larger frame buffer, the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO variant utilizes 350MHz DDR2 memory. Altogether, these changes boost fill-rate by 14% while memory bandwidth jumps from 19.8GB/sec in RADEON 9700 PRO to 21.8GB/sec in RADEON 9800 PRO (22.4GB/sec on the 256MB card).
Besides the clock frequency changes, ATI has also made improvements to its pixel-shading engine, occlusion culling technology, and the memory controller itself. We’ll start with the updated pixel-shading engine, dubbed SMARTSHADER 2.1.
SMARTSHADER 2.1
The key addition to the RADEON 9800 PRO’s pixel shading prowess is the new F-buffer present in SMARTSHADER 2.1. The F-buffer works like a form of cache memory, storing pixels that require multiple passes rather than writing them out to the frame buffer each time. This feature in particular was meant to address the shortcomings of RADEON 9700’s instruction length. With RADEON 9700 limited to 64 instructions, some complex shader effects required the pixel shading engine to make multiple passes. While this produced lifelike images, performance is crippled in the process. The F-buffer eliminates some of the redundancy from the graphics pipeline, saving time and reducing memory bandwidth requirements.
ATI also likes to point out that the F-buffer allows them to support fragment shader programs of unlimited length.
HYPERZ III+
HYPERZ is the term ATI uses for its occlusion culling technology, meant to prevent the graphics core from rendering objects that are hidden from the end user’s view. For example a poster placed on a wall, rather than rendering the entire wall and the poster, with HYPERZ the graphics core only renders the visible area of the wall as well as the poster, the area behind the poster is not rendered, making more efficient use of the graphics core and more importantly, its precious memory bandwidth.
HYPERZ III+ maintains the 24:1 lossless Z-buffer compression, Fast Z-buffer clear and 3-level Hierarchical Z-buffer first introduced in RADEON 9700, and adds an enhanced Z cache that has been optimized to work better with stencil buffers. This addition is meant to enhance RADEON 9800 PRO’s performance with next generation games that will use real-time shadow volumes extensively. Doom III is the most notable example.
SMOOTHVISION 2.1
The final piece to the RADEON 9800 puzzle is its enhanced memory controller. If you recall, the RADEON 9700 core utilized four 64-bit memory controllers. Each of the controllers can be simultaneously writing data to memory, or reading data back into the graphics processor. RADEON 9800 PRO’s controller has been optimized for greater efficiency, resulting in greater performance in 4x and especially 6x AA modes.
SIDEBAR: ATI is offering free shipping on a selection of graphics cards on its website
| Examining the cards | Page:: ( 3 / 18 ) |
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9800 PRO vs. 9700 PRO
ATI has made a number of changes to the board design of the RADEON 9800 PRO. The board itself is longer than RADEON 9700 PRO, although it isn’t as long as NVIDIA’s GeForce4 or GeForce FX 5x00 Ultra cards. While many of the parts are in the same places, we do see that ATI has added additional capacitors and other power circuitry to the RADEON 9800 PRO board design. Some of these parts are located on the right edge of the card, which accounts for its increased length.
One notable issue that has been addressed is heat. The original RADEON 9700 PRO could get pretty hot, especially after extended gaming sessions. ATI has addressed this with the use of a heatsinks on all voltage regulator modules (VRM); previously ATI used a metal plate to accomplish this. One long heatsink is used to cool both voltage regulators, increasing the surface area for better cooling. The plate ATI used on the RADEON 9700 PRO was definitely the hottest component on the board, but the 9800 PRO’s VRM heatsink only gets warm to the touch. A smaller heatsink with longer fins is also used at the back of the board.
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As you can also see in the pictures above, ATI has implemented a new cooling design for the RADEON 9800 PRO core. The heatsink is more compact but has more fins, while the fan has a more aggressive profile. Fortunately, noise levels are roughly the same as RADEON 9700 PRO.
128MB vs. 256MB
As we stated previously, the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO utilizes DDR2 rather than traditional DDR memory. ATI chose to go with DDR2 memory on the 256MB board because of its reduced power consumption, unfortunately one side effect of this is that current DDR2 modules generate a lot of heat.
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To counter this, ATI has attached heatsinks to the DDR2 modules, but each module has its own heatsink. A more effective approach would have used a larger heatsink to cool multiple modules, increasing the surface area of the heatsink and thus allowing it to perform more effectively. The implementation ATI has decided to go with results in sixteen hotspots on the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO card, making this one hot graphics card. You’ll definitely want to ensure that your case is adequately ventilated, especially if you decide to overclock your 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO card.
SIDEBAR: If you want to check out Half-Life 2 at E3 this year, ATI’s booth is the place to be
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 4 / 18 ) |
System Setup
Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz (Hyper-Threading enabled)
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe (875P)
512MB Corsair XMS3200 (operating at DDR400) SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO – 128MB
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO – 256MB
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
Driver version Catalyst 3.4
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Detonator 44.03
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 9.0
Benchmarks
3DMark 03
Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter (Elephant Atrium demo)
Unreal Tournament 2003
Comanche 4
Splinter Cell
SIDEBAR: We had to use the CATALYST 3.4 driver in order for the 256MB card to be recognized properly.
| 3DMark03 | Page:: ( 5 / 18 ) |
3DMark03
SIDEBAR: Unfortunately, the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB is on back order at ATI’s website.
| 3DMark03 – Frame Rates | Page:: ( 6 / 18 ) |
3DMark03 – Wings of Fury
3DMark03 – Battle of Proxycon
3DMark03 – Troll’s Lair
3DMark03 – Mother Nature
SIDEBAR: The 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO card is a little bit shorter than GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.
| CodeCreatures | Page:: ( 7 / 18 ) |
CodeCreatures Benchmark Pro
SIDEBAR: ATI is rumored to be working on an even more extreme version of the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB with higher clock speeds.
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 8 / 18 ) |
Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: The NVIDIA and ATI booths should be pretty interesting at E3 this year.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 9 / 18 ) |
Quake III - High Quality
SIDEBAR: If the RADEON 9800 PRO is too expensive for your taste, ATI recently began shipping its RADEON 9600 PRO.
| Comanche 4 | Page:: ( 10 / 18 ) |
Comanche 4 demo
SIDEBAR: ATI still hasn’t announced a workstation variant of RADEON 9800 PRO.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 11 / 18 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch
SIDEBAR: With NVIDIA and ATI shipping 256MB cards, you’ve got to wonder how long it will be before we start seeing cards with 512MB of memory.
| Splinter Cell | Page:: ( 12 / 18 ) |
Splinter Cell
SIDEBAR: We made sure to run both ATI and NVIDIA cards in projector mode for our Splinter Cell testing.
| 4x Anti-Aliasing | Page:: ( 13 / 18 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch
SIDEBAR: The RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB never got quite as hot as the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, but it was still a bit too warm for our taste.
| UT 4x AA/8x Aniso | Page:: ( 14 / 18 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 Flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 Botmatch
SIDEBAR: Anyone else wonder what a RADEON 9800 MAXX would perform like?
| 4x AA/8x Aniso | Page:: ( 15 / 18 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
SIDEBAR: Unfortunately, ATI no longer offers its trade-up program.
| Extreme Quality | Page:: ( 16 / 18 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
SIDEBAR: ATI recently added the 8500LE to its list of end-of-life products. RIP.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 17 / 18 ) |
Pros:
Performance: With RADEON 9800 PRO’s faster 380MHz core and 256-bit memory interface operating at 340MHz, ATI has tweaked the original 9700 PRO for even greater performance. As you saw in our test results, all of today’s latest games really fly on the 9800 PRO, even under high resolution environments with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. Sure, it may not be as fast as NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but the 9800 PRO still has plenty of horsepower to put up a really good fight.
Image quality: ATI’s anti-aliasing engine is still superior to NVIDIA’s latest efforts with their Detonator FX driver release, resulting in the crispest visuals currently available on the PC. ATI’s anisotropic filtering is also top notch, offering very sharp textures at a lesser performance hit than NVIDIA’s GeForce FX family.
Future-proof: Thanks to its 256MB frame buffer, end users can crank up the texture settings for even greater visual quality. We also saw performance benefits in Unreal Tournament 2003 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled (check out the extreme quality page).
And while we didn’t see any benefits in other benchmarks, we definitely believe the larger frame buffer will benefit massively multiplayer games like Verant’s upcoming titles Planetside and Star Wars Galaxies. These types of games are notorious for their steep memory requirements. Gamers with a 256MB card like the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB can enjoy these games at their highest level of detail without encountering the stuttering that would afflict a card with less memory, especially in systems with low system RAM.
Cons:
256MB Performance: While we just gave you a reason to opt for the 256MB variant of the RADEON 9800 PRO, keep in mind that we didn’t see many performance benefits in our overall testing. Sure, there are cases where it does offer a performance improvement (UT 2003 with 6xAA and 16x aniso at high res), but when memory bandwidth or fill-rate is the limiting factor (as is the case in Splinter Cell) the added 128MB of memory on the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO won’t have a performance impact.
Price: At $400 for the RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB, and $500 for the 256MB board, these are two very expensive video cards. Some may choose to pick up a RADEON 9700 PRO or vanilla RADEON 9800 (once they’re available) to save money. Each should offer much of the 9800 PRO’s performance, but a considerably lower price point.
Heat: The 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO card can get pretty hot, especially the DDR2 modules. Therefore, if you decide to go with the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO card, we suggest you ensure that your case has adequate ventilation.
SIDEBAR: We’re a bit surprised to see that the RADEON 9800 (non-PRO) is still MIA.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 18 / 18 ) |
RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB
At $500, the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB is one very expensive graphics card, it’s even more costly than the Athlon XP 3200+ and Pentium 4 3GHz! And as you saw in our performance testing, in most cases the additional memory doesn’t bring any performance benefit; all too often the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB is held up by the 9800 PRO core or its memory bandwidth rather than the size of the graphics card’s frame buffer.
We can definitely see the benefits of the 256MB card in massively multiplayer games, ATI even demonstrated a special very high quality version of Asheron’s Call 2 that was intended for use on the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB. But for everyone else, you’ll probably get more bang from your buck by opting for ATI’s 128MB RADEON 9800 PRO instead.
In addition, the card can get pretty hot under load, so if you do opt for the 256MB RADEON 9800 PRO board, we highly suggest you house it in a larger case with plenty of cooling.
With renewed competition from NVIDIA, ATI is no longer the undisputed king of the graphics segment, but the RADEON 9800 PRO is still tops in terms of visual quality and DVD playback. And while we still don’t know what NVIDIA has in store for the $400 GeForce FX 5900 128MB, the package ATI offers with the 128MB RADEON 9800 PRO should still be more than enough to please any gamer. The RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB has its audience as well, but at $500 it comes at a price that will be too high for many to afford.
SIDEBAR: Are you interested in a 256MB video card, or is $500 just too much to pay? Chat with others about the RADEON 9800 PRO cards, ATI versus NVIDIA and other topics in the news comments!