ATI All In Wonder 9700 Pro Preview
The Fastest 3D in a Multimedia Package

By: Chris Angelini
September 30, 2002


If ATI were a Winston Cup NASCAR, we'd say that the company is efficiently firing on all eight cylinders.  The Mobility RADEON 9000 rules the mobile market, the well publicized RADEON 9700 Pro delivers the best performance to gaming enthusiasts, and the RADEON 9000 Pro is a solid mainstream card.  Further, ATI's latest round of hardware has been complimented by relatively stable drivers - a first, as far as the gaming community is concerned.  After the past few months of heightened success, what more could we ask for from the Canadian firm?  Well, consider this...  Even while NVIDIA dominated the world of 3D performance, ATI's All-In-Wonder multimedia line remained virtually unchallenged.  Now that ATI has the new R300 graphics core to work with, it would certainly be nice to see an R300-based All-In-Wonder card.

And that's exactly what we're previewing here today,  ATI's upcoming All-In-Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro, the successor to the All-In-Wonder RADEON 8500.  The board itself won't be ready for the retail market until later this year, but considering ATI's quick follow-through after the RADEON 9700 Pro was launched, we'd have no reason to doubt that the beefy multimedia version will also arrive on time for the Christmas buying season.  Of course we're basing this on more than just "gut instinct."  For one, ATI ran the presentations during the RADEON 9700 Pro launch on an early All-In-Wonder card, which is why the press was able to watch a real-time demonstration of 128-bit floating point precision.  Then, ATI previewed the card itself at a separate press event earlier in September.  At that time, the hardware was said to be final, with some minor work left on the accompanying software suite.  So, while the complete package is being finished, we'll give you a peek at the card ATI will make available later this Fall.

Features of the All In Wonder RADEON 9700 Pro
ATi's Fully DX9 Compliant Rendering Engine

GRAPHICS TECHNOLOGY

  • RADEON 9700 Visual Processing Unit (VPU)

MEMORY CONFIGURATION

  • 128MB of double data rate SDRAM

3D GRAPHICS FEATURES

  • Eight parallel rendering pipelines

  • Four parallel geometry engines

  • High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support

  • 256-bit DDR memory interface

  • AGP 8X support

-SMARTSHADER 2.0

  • Full support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware

  • 2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass

  • 2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 1024 instructions with flow control

  • New 128-bit per pixel floating point color formats

  • Multiple Render Target (MRT) support

  • Shadow volume rendering acceleration

  • Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL via extensions

-SMOOTHVISION 2.0

  • State-of-the-art full-scene anti-aliasing

  • Supports 2x, 4x, and 6x modes with programmable sample patterns

  • Advanced anisotropic filtering

  • Supports up to 16 bilinear samples (in performance mode) or trilinear samples (in quality mode) per pixel

  • 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes

  • Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns

  • 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes

  • Adaptive algorithm with bilinear (performance) and trilinear (quality) options

  • Bandwidth-saving algorithm enables this feature with minimal performance cost

-HYPERZ III

  • Hierarchical Z-Buffer and Early Z Test reduce overdraw by detecting and discarding hidden pixels

  • Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth consumption by over 50%

  • Fast Z-Buffer Clear

-TRUFORM 2.0

  • 2nd generation N-patch higher order surface support

  • Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon for dynamic LOD

  • DirectX 9.0 displacement mapping

ALSO INCLUDED

  • Remote Wonder

  • ATI TV Wonder

  • YPrPb Component Output dongle

  • Multimedia Center version 8.0

 

VIDEO FEATURES

-VIDEOSHADER

  • Seamless integration of programmable pixel shaders with video data

  • High quality, hardware accelerated de-blocking of internet streaming video

  • Noise removal filter for captured video

  • Integrated MPEG-2 decode

  • Hardware accelerated iDCT, motion compensation, and color space conversion

  • Top quality DVD and all-format DTV/HDTV decode with low CPU overhead

  • Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback

  • Upscaling and downscaling with 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering

  • Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide

  • Unique per-pixel adaptive de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the bob and add-field (weave) techniques

FULLSTREAM video de-blocking technology

  • Noise removal filtering for captured video

  • MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion

  • All-format DTV/HDTV decoding

  • YPrPb component output

  • Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion

  • Dual integrated display controllers

  • Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400MHz DACs

  • Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI and HDCP compliant)

  • Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution

  • Optimized for Pentium 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon 3Dnow!

  • PC 2002 compliant

DISPLAY FEATURES

  • Dual integrated display controllers

  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions and refresh rates

  • HYDRAVISION software provides complete control over multi-display configurations with a user-friendly interface

  • Dual integrated 10-bit per channel palette DACs operating at up to 400MHz

  • Integrated 165MHz TMDS transmitter supports resolutions up to QXGA (2048x1536) and complies with DVI and HDCP specifications

  • Integrated TV-Out support up to 1024x768 resolution

  • YPrPb output for direct drive of HDTV monitors

DISPLAY SUPPORT

  • S-video or composite connector for TV/VCR

  • DVI-I connector for digital CRT or flat panel

GENERAL FEATURES

  • Comprehensive 4x and 8x AGP support

  • Fully compliant with PC 2002 requirements

  • Optimized for Pentium 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon 3Dnow! processor instructions

  • Supports THEATER 200 companion chip for NTSC/PAL/SECAM video capture

  • Highly optimized 128-bit 2D engine with support for new Windows XP GDI extensions

The Card and Software