ATI RADEON 9000 PRO: TYAN Tachyon G9000 Graphics Card Review

by FastSite
09/23/2002 | 12:00 AM

On July 18, 2002, ATI announced its RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 PRO chips previously code-named RV250. ATI positions RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 PRO chips as value graphics solutions with full DirectX 8.1 support. ATI sees its new chips as a natural replacement for RADEON 7500 - previous generation value chips. Top-end RADEON 8500 is to be replaced with the DirectX 9 compatible RADEON 9700.<%BANNER[article]%>

Well, here it is: RV250 aka RADEON 9000/RADEON PRO. The chip is based on R200 (RADEON 8500) that has already won very good reputation. ATI engineers followed the practice of "removing" and simplifying some units of the basic chip as they had done with RADEON VE, for example. The result is lower performance, but also low production costs and the actual price of the chip.

The RV250 core hit the market in two incarnations: RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 PRO. ATI recommends the following core frequencies for graphics cards based on them:

• RADEON 9000 PRO: core - 275MHz, graphics memory - 550MHz (275MHz DDR)
• RADEON 9000: core - 250MHz, graphics memory - 400MHz (200MHz DDR)

The arrival of these GPUs indicates the beginning of a new round of competition among the leading graphics card manufacturers fighting for our cash. Today we're going to review the performance and features of RADEON 9000 / RADEON 9000 PRO and have a guess at their market future. The Tachyon G9000 card from TYAN will be the one we will take a look at

Specs and Features of RV250 (ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO)

RV250 was made of "the rib" of R200, so it's easiest to evaluate the features list of RV250 (ATI RADEON 9000/9000 PRO) in comparison with R200 (ATI RADEON 8500). Here is what we've got:

We have already got used to "cut-down" chips having lower speed and less impressive features set than their "thoroughbred" parents. That's the way it was with GeForce2 MX / GeForce2 GTS, GeForce4 Ti / GeForce4 MX from NVIDIA or RADEON / RADEON VE from ATI.

But here ATI seems to "have cut off" quite little and even added to RV250 a few features R200 never possessed.

In detail:

• RV250 features one texture module per every pixel pipeline, while R200 has two. It means that in one core clock RV250 can only lay one texture, while R200 - two.
  Nevertheless, RV250 as well as R200 can process 6 textures per pass. Of course, it's done less fast: RV250 requires one clock to lay every new texture and in case of 6 textures it will need 6 clocks to draw every single pixel. R200 is twice as fast: it needs only 3 clocks for the same task.
• RV250 doesn't support TruForm so far. Maybe we'll see it in future driver updates but anyway the performance with TruForm turned on is going to be much lower than that of RADEON 8500. Why? See the next paragraph.
• RV250 supports hardware T&L and vertex shaders, but these units are about twice as weak as compared to those of R200.
• RV250 is equipped with a TV-Out and second RAMDAC, so there's no need now to install the second RAMDAC from third parties and the ATI RAGE Theater chip for multimedia support as it was with RADEON 8500 based graphics cards.

To sum up, RV250 is a chip with full Direct8.1 support, which inherited all the key features from R200. Moreover, some parts of R200 architecture were improved to boost the performance of the new core. The name is telling that: "V" in "RV250" means "value version" while the number 250 tells that there're some improvements of the previous R200 architecture.

We'll see a bit later how the new graphics core from ATI performs. Right now we'll have a look at the card, the main character of our today's story, TYAN Tachyon G9000 based on ATI RADEON 9000 PRO.

TYAN Tachyon G9000: Closer Look

Up till now TYAN hasn't been involved in graphics card production, limiting itself to server platforms and desktop mainboards. Anyway, on July 18, 2002, the company announced the first graphics card in its history: Tachyon G9000 PRO based on ATI RADEON 9000 PRO.

Here's the meaning of the name: there's a hypothesis in quantum mechanics that there exist peculiar particles, tachyons, that feature virtual weight and move with the velocity higher than that of light. According to the press release, new graphics cards, like the hypothetical particles, should provide tremendous speed and image quality in computer games.

We managed to get a pre-production sample of the "tachyon 3D accelerator" from TYAN:

   

And here's the good old ATI RADEON 8500:

   

You can see that there's no secondary RAMDAC or ATI Rage Theater chip on the PCB. These parts we used to see in ATI RADEON 8500, but now they're inside the graphics core. The card layout follows the ATI RADEON 8500 reference design. TYAN Tachyon G9000 PRO is equipped with D-SUB and DVI-I connectors and a composite TV-Out connector.

The heart of the card is the ATI RADEON 9000 PRO chip:

The card is equipped with 64MB of 128-bit DDR SDRAM graphics memory from Hynix with 3.3ns access time.

The frequencies of the core and the memory comply with those recommended by ATI 275MHz for the core and 550MHz (275MHz DDR) for the graphics memory.

The TYAN Tachyon G9000 PRO package includes a user's manual, an S-Video cable, S-Video-to-RCA adapter, RCA cable and DVI-I-to-VGA adapter.

Testbed and Methods

We tested the cards in the following system:

• AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU;
• MSI K7T266 Pro2 v2.0 (VIA KT266A) mainboard;
• 2 x 256MB PC2700 CL2.5 DDR SDRAM by Crucial;
• Fujitsu MPF3153AH HDD.

We utilized the following software:

• Detonator 30.82 driver for Windows XP for a NVIDIA GeForce MX460 based graphics card;
• 6.13.10.6118 driver for ATI RADEON 8500 and Tachyon G9000 PRO graphics cards;
• 3.03.51 driver for a SiS Xabre 400 based graphics card;
• Windows XP;
• 3DMark 2001 SE build 330;
• Quake3 Arena v 1.30;
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter;
• Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO v.927.

We ran these applications in the following modes:

3DMark 2001

32bit frame buffer, 32bit textures and 32 (24) bit Z-buffer, D3D Hardware T&L/Pure Hardware T&L.

Quake3 Arena

All tests were run with 32bit colour and texture depth. The graphics quality settings were set the maximum, with tri-linear filtering and texture compression enabled.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter

We tested in Quality mode, i.e. with "Quality" graphics quality settings, 32bit color mode.

Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO v.927

Default graphics quality settings.

Performance

Synthetic Benchmarks

First, let's check new ATI chip performance in synthetic tests:

In the test with one light source, RADEON 9000 PRO fell just a little behind its forefather R200. When the amount of calculations increased (up to 8 light sources), the gap grew bigger: the performance of the newcomer's T&L unit appeared twice as poor as that of the same unit by RADEON 8500 working at the same core clock.

So, RADEON 9000 PRO T&L unit is much weaker. If R200 has two T&L and vertex shaders units working in parallel (the company doesn't officially confirm or deny it), then RV250 seems to have one T&L unit only. As a result, it was defeated here by all probable competitors from the same price group.

It seems to be the same with the vertex shaders unit, but here RADEON 9000 PRO quite naturally outpaced NVIDIA GeForce4 MX460 and SiS Xabre 400. These cards don't have full hardware vertex shaders support so the calculations were performed by the CPU. Software emulation on Athlon XP 2000+ proved much slower than even the weakened vertex shaders unit in RADEON 9000 PRO.

Fill rate test shows one more parameter, which is far from being a trump of RADEON 9000 PRO compared to RADEON 8500. RV250 has only one texturing module per pipeline, while R200 has two of them. So, the multitexturing speed of RADEON 9000 PRO was twice as low as that of RADEON 8500. Without multitexturing, both ATI chips proved about the same: both feature four pixel pipelines and work at the same frequencies.

Interesting that during multitexturing ATI RADEON 9000 PRO nearly reached the theoretical maximum of 1100Mtexel/sec (98.6% of the possible maximum) while RADEON 8500 notched only 86% of the theoretical 2200Mtexel/sec. The pipeline of RV250 works in a more favourable mode, so that there is a new clock dedicated for the extraction of the texture samples from every new texture, more effectively conceals graphics memory latency.

On the other hand, RADEON 9000 PRO loses to RADEON 8500 when working with 32-bit color and without multitexturing. Let's see what exactly is responsible for the performance drop, by changing the colour mode of the frame buffer, textures and Z-buffer from 16 to 32bit (24bit).

RADEON 9000 PRO is really less sensitive to texture color depth than RADEON 8500. On the other hand, switching the frame buffer to 32bit led to greater performance drop by RADEON 9000 PRO. It looks as if the pixel cache or alternative reading/writing into the graphics memory work less efficiently by RV250.

Multitexturing test reveals no slumps in performance of both RV250 and R200.

The VillageMark test clearly demonstrates how lower texturing speed may lead to poor overall performance in applications depending a lot on this parameter. RADEON 9000 PRO is about twice as slow as RADEON 8500 in all resolutions.

We shouldn't be much surprised at high results of SiS Xabre 400. In all the tests, SiS Xabre used "turbo texturing" mode, set as default in the driver. It provides higher performance at the expense of lower texture filtering quality. You can find more details about it in our SiS Xabre 400 Review.

Here the number "250" in the name of the chip speaks for itself. Despite the "cut-down" pixel pipelines, RADEON 9000 PRO worked with this pixel shader much faster than RADEON 8500, not to mention SiS Xabre 400.

A more complex pixel shader test puts RADEON 8500 onto the top, although the new ATI chip still managed to outpace SiS Xabre.

Here all the cards show about the same results.

And here the innovations implemented by ATI engineers in the new RADEON 9000 PRO show up again. The chip is the leader, RADEON 8500 got the second place, SiS Xabre is a clear outsider. NVIDIA GeForce4 MX460 has no EMBM support at all.

3D Gaming Benchmarks

RADEON 9000 PRO suffered the first significant defeat. In the "Low Detail" mode, its slow T&L unit and lower texturing speed set it back in all resolutions. In the "High Detail" mode, the limiting impact of the CPU led to all the cards showing about the same results: no use to dwell on them here.

The overdraw parameter, indicating how greatly the objects in the scene overlap, grew bigger in this scene. Besides, this scene also involves vertex shaders and three texture layers. All this helps RADEON 9000 PRO to beat its rivals as the chip features an effective anti-overdraw system, including HyperZ II, hardware support of vertex shaders and the ability to lay up to six textures per pass. SiS Xabre 400 can lay up to four textures per pass, but has no vertex shaders support while NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 cannot manage high overdraw level and lay more than two textures per pass.

Here, as in the previous test, RADEON 9000 PRO is just a little short of RADEON 8500, beating both other testing participants.

Lower texturing and vertex shaders speeds of RADEON 9000 PRO told in the Nature test, and even faster processing of the pixel shaders didn't help

Anyway, the performance gap between our hero and the leader is not so big as we have expected it to be bearing in mind that RADEON 9000 PRO is a "cut-down" chip. In the meanwhile, however, the "accomplished" SiS Xabre 400 was more than twice as slow as the new ATI solution. Poor pixel shader processing and no vertex shaders support are responsible for the result.

The old buddy Quake3 is serving its last days as a performance test. All it can now demand from a contemporary graphics card is high fillrate. RADEON 9000 PRO didn't rise to the occasion: it won only the third prize in 1024x768 and arrived the last in higher resolutions.

As Quake3 Arena is rather simple and predictable, it's easy to check anisotropic filtering speed in it. Let's try to compare the performance drop with 16x anisotropic filtering enabled:

The performance drop caused by the enabled anisotropic filtering by both RADEON 9000 PRO and RADEON 8500 turned to be the same: both solutions feature identical units, which provide identical texture filtering quality at equal loss. The difference in 1280x1024 resolution can be easily explained by the fact that the only weak spot of the ATI RADEON 8500 was the processor, while by ATI RADEON 9000 PRO the potential of the graphics chip itself was insufficient. That is why enabling anisotropic filtering by RADEON 8500 didn't cause any tremendous performance drop. In 1600x1200, the results of both cards are no longer hindered by the CPU and everything returns to its natural course again.

ATI RADEON 9000 PRO and RADEON 8500 showed about the same results, with a slight advantage of the newcomer. It is very impressive, I should say: the "cut-down" chip, thanks to the innovations, can outpace its forefather even in a real gaming test, not to mention synthetic benchmark.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter will serve to check the performance with full-screen 4x anti-aliasing enabled ("4x Quality in ATI RADEON 9000 PRO / RADEON 8500"):

Here both ATI chips perform equally fast. RV250 seems to have borrowed the entire SMOOTHVISION technology from its predecessor without any changes. As for performance with full-screen anti-aliasing, there is nothing nice we could say: SMOOTHVISION is supersampling and even in 800x600 ATI cards provided no acceptable gaming performance.

For more information on SMOOTHVISION, supersampling and full-screen anti-aliasing, please, see our article called: "On the Way to Ideal Picture: Anti-Aliasing by Contemporary Graphics Cards".

This test serves to demonstrate the performance level of present-day graphics cards in contemporary 3D games, and first of all in Unreal Tournament 2003.

This test wouldn't run on SiS Xabre 400, all the other cards showed similar results. It's rather strange, as they have very different features as well as performance. Well, just note that according to the results, these solutions should offer acceptable gaming performance. As for the similarity of the results, well, let's consider the unofficial and quite "raw" benchmark to be responsible for this phenomenon.

3D Image Quality

Image quality offered by ATI RADEON 9000 / 9000 PRO didn't change at all compared with that of ATI RADEON 8500. There is hardly anything we could add here. It looks as if ATI engineers were sparing all the most interesting things for their RADEON 9700 :)

You can get more details on 3D quality by ATI RADEON 8500 in our ATI RADEON 8500 and RADEON 8500LE Graphics Cards Review and in the article called: "On the Way to Ideal Picture: Anti-Aliasing by Contemporary Graphics Cards".

2D Image Quality

The TYAN Tachyon G9000 graphics card was tested with Hitachi CM776ET, ViewSonic P775 and ViewSonic PT813 monitors. We have no complaints about the image quality in resolutions up to 1280x1024. But in 1600x1200 at 75Hz and 85Hz the picture got perceptibly blurry.

Conclusion

The RV250 chip may be called a ATI's success. Its features, except TruForm, are just the same as by RADEON 8500. Although it boasts a certain bonus, such as integrated TV-Out and second 400MHz RAMDAC.

It yields a bit to RADEON 8500 in performance, but not so drastically as the "cut-down" GeForce4MX loses to its "full-functional" mate, GeForce4 Titanium.

Until now, there were no graphics cards positioned as an about $100 solution that would fully support DirectX 8.1. The arrival of RADEON 9000 / 9000 PRO is a kind of small revolution: if we sum up its performance, functionality and graphics quality, its competitors from the same price group, namely GeForce4 MX and SiS Xabre, will never be able to come even close to that. So, the most dangerous rivals of RADEON 9000 / 9000 PRO based graphics cards for now are the cards based on "fully fledged", but out-dated chips, which got cheaper with the time. I am talking about NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti200 and ATI RADEON 8500 / 8500 LE. But they're going to leave the market in the near future and give way to the newcomers. And the best of the newcomers for today is ATI RADEON 9000 / 9000 PRO.

We hope that ATI will continue pursuing aggressive price policy and when the "newness factor" expires, RADEON 9000 / 9000 PRO based graphics cards will occupy the intended price niche - about $100.

So, lets sum up the advantages and drawbacks of ATI RADEON 9000 PRO and the TYAN Tachyon G9000 graphics card based on ATI RADEON 9000 PRO.

Highs:

• Fully-fledged hardware support of DirectX 8.1;
• High performance in 3D;
• High picture quality in 3D;
• Good 2D image quality;
• Support of multi-display configurations, DVI and TV-Out.

Lows:

• High performance drop with enabled full-screen anti-aliasing;
• Not very powerful T&L and vertex shaders units.

The performance differences between graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 PRO as well as the advantages of 128MB versions of these cards compared to 64MB ones, will be discussed in our ongoing reviews.