SUMMARY: We've been hearing all kinds of good things so far concerning the new ATi Radeon 9700 series graphics cards, but can it possibly live up to all the hype? Come join Tio Chaharbaghi as he takes a look at this beast and tells us once and for all if it has what it takes to become the next champ, or the next chump!
Radeon 9700 Pro requires connection to your PC's internal power supply for operation. A 300-watt power supply or greater is recommended to ensure normal system operation where a number of other internal devices are installed.
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).
128MB of system memory
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
DVD playback requires DVD drive
Graphics Technology
RADEON™ 9700 Pro Visual Processing Unit (VPU)
Memory Configuration
128MB of double data rate SDRAM
Operating Systems Support
Windows® XP
Windows® 2000
Windows® Me
Display Support
VGA connector for analog CRT
S-video or composite connector for TV / VCR
DVI-I connector for digital CRT or flat panel
Independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays
Features
Eight parallel rendering pipelines
Four parallel geometry engines
256-bit DDR memory interface
AGP 8X support
SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
16 textures per pass
Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
Multiple render target support
Shadow volume rendering acceleration
High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL
SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0
2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options
HYPER Z™ III
3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
Fast Z-Buffer Clear
TRUFORM™ 2.0
2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
Displacement mapping
VIDEOSHADER™
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
Noise removal filtering for captured video
MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
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