The ATi Radeon 9700 Pro Full Release Review
ATi Technologies Overtakes NVIDIA's Flagship GPU

By, Dave Altavilla
August 19, 2002

We've shown you around ATi's new Catalyst driver suite recently but wanted to give you a quick refresh on all that they have to offer.  Where ATi has historically had an Achilles' Heel with respect to driver stability and optimizations, they have come full circle this year and now have functionality and stability that rivals any offering on the market.

Radeon 9700 Pro and Catalyst Drivers
Stability and great functionality

There are a multitude of control panels within the Catalyst driver version 7.75 that we tested the Radeon 9700 Pro with.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 

Anisotropic Filtering up to 16X (64 tap), 6X AA, Mip Map and Texture detail are all available for tweaking to your hearts content.  Actually, these drivers offer Anisotropic filtering adjustments in Direct 3D which are not an option in NVIDIA's Detonator driver suite.  You also get the standard issue gamma adjustments, display preferences and video overlay settings.  We did notice one small glitch with the board however, at least in our WinXP setup.  The card seemed somewhat sluggish at redrawing menus when moving through the WinXP interface.  We're not sure if this was a driver issue or what and are researching the problem with ATi.

Let's have a look at what sort of 3D image quality the Radeon 9700 Pro can deliver and fire up its SmoothVision AA engine with a couple game titles for comparison.

 

Comanche 4 and Jedi Knight II AA Tests
4X AA versus 16X FAA versus 6X Gamma Corrected Radeon 9700 AA

We've taken screen shots from Novalogic's Comanche 4 and Jedi Knight II.  We'll compare various AA settings for you here versus 4X AA on the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4600 and 16XFAA on the Matrox Parhelia.  Our aim in this test is to enable each card's best AA quality for comparison, regardless of frame rate.  We'll get back to the frame rate side of things later.

Reference No AA

 

Reference No AA

GeForce 4 4X AA

GeForce 4 4X AA

Parhelia 16X FAA

Parhelia 16X FAA

R9700 4X AA

R9700 4XAA

 
R9700 6X AA

 
R9700 6X AA

Here are a few observations we've made here.  In the Parhelia 16X FAA shots the rotor blades on the chopper are literally untouched by the AA engine it seems.  They look very jagged when compared to any of the other AA shots in this test.  Then we get to the 4X AA shots.  For sure they look very clean with crisp lines on the copter, edges of the tents and the flagpole is nearly perfect.  However, take a look at the 6X AA shots on the Radeon 9700.  There is not an edge anywhere in these shots, that does not look perfectly crisp.  This was to be expected of course with a 6X AA sampling method and gamma correction on sampled pixels of the Radeon 9700 shots.  Let's have a look at an image we used in our Parhelia review, which really told the story well.

 

Reference No AA

 

GeForce 4 4X AA

 

Parhelia 16X FAA

R9700 6X AA

Again, what we are showcasing here is the maximum AA setting for each card compared.  As you can see the Parhelia shot is definitely better looking AA than the 4X GeForce 4 shot.  However, we would also offer that the 6X AA Radeon 9700 shot is nearly pixel perfect and slightly better than the Parhelia generated image.  As always, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you be the judge.

Did someone say benchmarks?  Yeah... we have a few of those.

Benchmarks and real numbers!