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ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9800 Preview July 27, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: ATI is set to deliver new levels of performance with their MOBILITY RADEON 9800. Its M18 core is based on ATI's RADEON X800 VPU, and sports an eight pixel pipeline architecture with a 256-bit memory interface. In fact, the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 sports so many features, it may make RADEON 9700 and 9800 users jealous. Find out why in today's article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 3 ) |
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Thanks to recent advances in mobile graphics, namely the unveiling of DX9 chips such as ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON 9600/9700 and NVIDIA’s GeForce FX Go 5700, gaming on the go has never been better. Blockbuster titles such as Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament 2004, and Splinter Cell run quite fluidly on today’s high-end, and even many mid-range notebooks, leaving smiles on the faces of many gamers stuck in waiting rooms, or worse yet, enduring a grueling 3 or 4 hour layover at the airport.
There are a few compromises that a gamer must make in order to ensure fluid frame rates with these mobile chips however. For instance, many desktop replacement notebooks ship with high-end displays with native resolutions of 1600x1200, or in the case of the Dell Inspiron XPS, a whopping 1920x1200! These resolutions are simply too high for today’s mobile graphics parts, they just don’t have the memory bandwidth to keep the graphics core fed with data, resulting in sluggish performance.
Other eye candy features such as anti-aliasing and to a lesser extent, anisotropic filtering also put too much of a burden on today’s mobile offerings. Frame rates often drop into single digits at high resolutions with these features turned on. The “game” that you were playing at low resolutions just a few minutes ago literally turns into a slideshow instead. This is hardly an enjoyable experience.
Complicating matters is the increasing complexity of today’s games. Whereas a year ago we were scrambling to find a game that would take advantage of the 256MB of memory many desktop graphics cards were shipping with, we’ve now run into cases where 256MB can play a huge role in Call of Duty (with texture quality cranked up to “extra”) and Far Cry (under “very high” quality mode). And with the imminent release of high-end titles such as Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 (and the games based on those engines), the situation will only get worse. Quite simply, today’s mobile chips will soon begin to really show signs of age.
With this paradigm shift in gaming right around the corner, ATI’s mobile team realized that an equally radical mobile graphics solution would be required for these software titles. Therefore, a new mobile category was created: the desknote.
For desknote systems, ATI and notebook designers have established larger power budgets to play with, allowing them to integrate more powerful components in their notebook designs than they could have under more traditional guidelines for desktop replacement systems. As any RADEON 9800 or GeForce 5900 Ultra owner can tell you, these components tend to run hotter and consume more power than lesser graphics cards.
Desknote systems are also designed with more effective cooling systems in order to ensure an optimal thermal environment. Dell’s Inspiron XPS is a perfect example of this. The notebook we tested last week shipped with a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 processor, 2GB of DDR400 RAM, a 7200 RPM hard drive, and MOBILITY RADEON 9700 graphics, yet it barely got warm to the touch, even after extended gaming sessions.
With new guidelines in place, and a new philosophy from OEMs targeting gamers as a key customer, ATI set out to change all the rules once again when it comes to mobile graphics performance. The result? ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON 9800!
SIDEBAR: ATI claims a 3DMark 04 score of 5,448 3Dmarks at 1024x768 for MOBILITY RADEON 9800, no AA/AF on an Inspiron XPS 3.2GHz system with 1GB DDR 400 memory.
| Core details | Page:: ( 2 / 3 ) |
M18 core
Like the MOBILITY RADEON 9700, the MOBILITY RADEON 9800’s name is a bit misleading. While the “9800” in MOBILITY 9800 implies that its M18 core is based around RADEON 9800 technology from a year ago, ATI actually leverages X800 technology for MOBILITY RADEON 9800.
This means that the M18 core MOBILITY RADEON 9800 is based around is built on TSMC’s 0.13-micron manufacturing process with low-k dielectric, rather than RADEON 9800’s larger 0.15-micron process. The use of 0.13-micron allows ATI to cram more features into a smaller area and with reduced power requirements than if they would have relied on 0.15-micron, while low-k lets them crank up the clock frequencies without excessive crosstalk, which wastes power and ultimately generates more heat.
ATI outfits MOBILITY RADEON 9800’s M18 core with eight pixel pipelines, double the amount found on any other mobile graphics product. Coupled alongside these pixel pipelines are four vertex pipes, again doubling anything else on the market in mobile. These shading engines ensure that the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 will perform well with tomorrow’s shader-heavy DX9 titles, while at the same time providing M18 with more fill-rate than any other mobile part on the market, guaranteeing solid performance with today’s DX7 and DX8 games.
With a core clock frequency of 350MHz, MOBILITY RADEON 9800 boasts a fill rate of 2.8 Gigatexels/second. (ATI’s previous high-end offering, MOBILITY RADEON 9700, tops out at 1.8 Gigatexels/second.) This figure is just 30MHz shy of RADEON 9800 PRO on the desktop, which is clocked at 380MHz.
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Memory subsystem and 3Dc
Of course, having a fast graphics core means nothing if it’s being held up by its memory. To help make certain that this doesn’t happen, the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 sports a 256-bit memory interface (with four 64-bit memory controllers), another industry first. MOBILITY RADEON 9800 can be configured with up to 256MB of GDDR3 or DDR1 memory operating at 300MHz (600MHz effective), ensuring good performance at high resolutions, and hopefully with a little bit of AA and AF applied as well.
The addition of GDDR3 support is good for notebook manufacturers looking to conserve power, while GDDR3 also runs cooler than older memory types (assuming equal clock speeds). We’ve been told that Dell will be relying on DDR1 memory for their Inspiron notebook systems however, most likely because supply of GDDR3 is still tight.
ATI finishes M18 off with X800’s other main additions, 3Dc and enhanced shader support via pixel shader 2.0b. 3Dc provides compression for normal maps, which are being used in an increasing number of games, while shader model 2.0b provides increased shader lengths, up to 1,536 instructions are supported in 2.0b (versus 160 in 2.0). And of course, M18 continues to support ATI’s POWERPLAY technology, which dynamically adjusts clock speeds and voltage based on usage, as well as Clock Gating, which shuts off portions of the chip which aren’t in use.
SIDEBAR: With 4xAA, 8xAF in 3DMark 03 at 1600x1200, ATI claims a score of 1412 3Dmarks, while Painkiller 1.2 performance at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF is 51.2 fps.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 3 / 3 ) |
ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON 9800 appears poised to set new levels of performance in the mobile market, just as ATI did a few years ago with their original DX9 part, RADEON 9700. This is made possible due to the MOBILITY RADEON 9800’s eight pixel pipeline architecture and 256-bit memory interface, both of which are industry firsts.
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With clock speeds of 350MHz core/300MHz memory, we expect it will perform similarly to ATI’s RADEON 9800, although the additions of 3Dc and SMARTSHADER HD’s 2.0b support should give the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 more longevity than RADEON 9700/9800, and potentially better image quality. We won’t know the answer to the latter part though until the first crop of 3Dc games ship.
If you’re interested in picking up a MOBILITY RADEON 9800 equipped system, your choices are pretty limited for the immediate future, as ATI has signed an exclusive 30-day agreement with Dell. This could keep prices artificially high at first, as other OEMs are shut out from offering MOBILITY 9800 graphics as an option, although we’ll have to wait and see how this plays out. Existing Dell Inspiron XPS and Inspiron 9100 owners can upgrade their current systems to MOBILITY RADEON 9800 for $399, which includes installation.
We’re now eager to see how the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 performs under extensive gaming test sessions. Thanks to its X800 roots, MOBILITY RADEON 9800 should deliver groundbreaking performance in the mobile market, reinforcing ATI’s lead over NVIDIA, and making desktop gamers with RADEON 9700s and 9800s jealous in the process. If you’ve been debating which high-end mobile graphics solution is best for you, the launch of the MOBILITY RADEON 9800 now makes the choice simple: ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON 9800 stands head and shoulders above the rest.