Manufacturers: ATI   Products: Radeon 9800 Pro   Availability: Now   Authors:   Date: 4-02-03   Price: $399

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The Radeon 9700 Pro was the first Graphics card released with a VPU able to make full use of the features available with DirectX 9.0. This includes Vertex Shader v2.0 and Pixel Shader v2.0. Technologies such as Smartshader 2.0 and Hyper Z III introduced with the 9700 Pro raised the bar for new graphics cards, offering complex cinematic quality details at frame rates that are as equally impressive. Since that time, ATI has refined those technologies in the Radeon 9800 Pro, making it much more efficient at performing complex tasks. Add to that higher core and memory clock speeds and you have the makings of a graphics powerhouse.

With Smartshader 2.1, the ability to create interactive lifelike animation is even more possible than before. This new implementation on the 9800 Pro helps handle complex calculations more efficiently while rendering imagery. In English, Visual Processing Units that do not support this technique are less likely to create the same quality image at the same frames per second. An image is comprised of thousands of pixels, which are a collaboration of numbers calculated by the VPU. This starts out as a simple 2+2=4, 4+4=8, and so on until this process reaches your screen. Most gaming cards can only do this with error. (Ex. 2+2=3.5, 3.5+3.5=6, etc.) The further down the line it goes, the greater the resulting error becomes. This error results in pixel distortion, color deficiency, or lack of images all together. This is why CAD cards make sure those mathematical errors are not there so that the rendered image is crisp, without flaws or missing details. The problem with cards geared toward CAD level applications is they do not have the horsepower or instructional fortitude to do this at the high frame rates that gaming requires.

The R350 core (manufactured on the 0.15-micron process), can handle these calculations better than its predecessor, the R300, can. There are still eight pipelines for rending this information, but it does this work much more efficiently with a higher memory and core clock. This efficiency means it does not require bulky or noisy fans for increased performance levels. By keeping the core on the .15u process, and raising the clock speeds, ATI is able to keep cost on production to a minimum. This brings up the question of what ATI could do with a .13 process. I guess we all have to wait and see.

Smoothvision 2.1 technology derived from Smoothvision 2.0 is what makes this card really shine. It optimizes the memory to be as efficient as possible under heavy loads, such as anti-aliasing and high resolutions. This is something you must experience in games, if you are a gamer, to really appreciate the advantages. Even old games are revived when these features enabled. Hyper Z III+ also controls memory bandwidth efficiency. This is very important for upcoming games using the Doom III Engine, which will implement real time shadows heavily. This method takes a lot of computation, which eats up most of the memory bandwidth, thus showing the performance bottleneck on most video cards. The Hyper Z technology helps control this bottleneck by looking ahead and seeing what the next frame is going to render and not painting all the pixels that are normally hidden from the user's view, thus saving memory bandwidth.

The Radeon 9800 Pro has done some weight lifting, since it's slightly larger than the 9700 Pro and
9500 Pro. However, it is slightly smaller than the FX. ATI has added a few new heat sinks and an entirely new heat sink design for the VPU as well. The fan however, is no louder than that found o n the 9700. The power connector is a standard Molex connector, an improvement over the old floppy power connection.

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