SUMMARY: ATi recently surprised us with the release of two new graphics chipsets - the R9700 for high-end users and the R9000 for those on a budget. Early previews have shown that the R9700 provides performance that is far superior to what we have previously seen from any past 3D accelerator while the R9000 provides performance that places it well ahead of competing chipsets that are in the same price. Asher "Acid" Moses takes a look at Hercules solution, the 3D Prophet 9000.
Intel® Pentium® 4/III/II/Celeron™, AMD® K6/Duron™/Athlon®/Athlon XP® or compatible with AGP 2X (3.3v), 4X (1.5V), 8X (0.8v) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration (2X/4X/8X). 64MB of system memory Installation software requires CD-ROM drive DVD playback requires DVD drive
- Graphics Technology
RADEON™ 9000 PRO graphics technology operating at 275MHz
- Memory Configuration
64MB or 128MB of DDR memory operating at 550 MHz
- Operating System Support
Windows® XP Windows® 2000 Windows® Me Windows® 98/98SE
- Monitor Support
CRT monitor: 15-pin VGA connector TV and VCR: s-video or composite connector DVI-I (flat panel display) connector
- Display Support
Register compatible with VGA Supports VESA PnP compatible displays BIOS compatible with VESA for super VGA DDC1/2b/2b+ monitor support VESA Display Power Management Support Separate horizontal and vertical synchronization at TTL levels
- CHARISMA ENGINE™ II Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine 43 million triangles per second peak throughput Advanced vertex shader support for the latest programmable effects
- SMARTSHADER™ technology
Full support for DirectX ® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware 1.4 pixel shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass 1.1 vertex shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL ® via extensions Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles
- SMOOTHVISION™
Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D™ and OpenGL ® applications Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact
- HYPERZ™ II
Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth by up to 25%
- VIDEO FEATURES
FULLSTREAM™ Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams VIDEO IMMERSION™ II delivers industry-leading DVD playback Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques YUV to RGB color space conversion Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering Upscaling and downscaling Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics
- DISPLAY FEATURES
Dual integrated display controllers to drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates HYDRAVISION™ software provides complete control over multi-display configurations with a user-friendly interface 400MHz Dual integrated DACs with 10-bit per channel palette Integrated DVI-compliant 165MHz TMDS transmitter Integrated TV-Out support up to 1024x768 resolution
- GENERAL FEATURES
Comprehensive 2X and 4X AGP support. Compatible with AGP 8X universal motherboards. Fully compliant with PC 2002 requirements Optimized for Pentium ® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow! processor instructions Highly optimized 128-bit 2D engine with support for new Windows ® XP GDI extensions
