A day later than we had initially expected, ATI announced three new chips: RADEON 9700, RADEON 9000 Pro and RADEON 9000. There were 4 different press-releases devoted to this event, which are honestly all pretty vague and unclear, just like all the previous ones (as you know, we haven’t expected anything different). Well, we have already got used to it, actually, so let’s simply sum everything up to create a clear picture of the event.

We will start with RADEON 9000 Pro and RADEON 9000 chips:

• Both chips are based on the sane RV250 graphics core and differ only by the working frequency. RV250 is a slightly modified R200 core (used in RADEON 8500/LE) with the integrated TV-Out support (it needs no external TV-Out chip).
• RADEON 9000LE chip is very likely not to exist at all. ATI will make graphics cards only on RADEON 9000 Pro chip working at 275MHz/550MHz.
• RADEON 9000 chip, which will be used only by ATI’s AIB partners, is unknown. According to the press-release, RADEON 9000 will work at 250MHz/400MHz DDR. However, no doubt that very soon we will see RADEON 9000 based graphics cards in the market with absolutely different frequencies. We have already got used to things like that.
• The graphics cards on RADEON 9000 Pro and RADEON 9000 will be equipped with 64MB of memory as a standard. We don’t know if 128Mb versions will ever come out. It is not that important, I should say.
• ATI has already started shipping its own made graphics cards on RADEON 9000 Pro. They are offered at the recommended price of $149. Not bad, not bad.

And now let’s pass over to the most interesting solution of the announced ones: RADEON 9700 chip (aka R300), the representative of the third generation of ATI’s graphics chips (see picture here:

• 0.15micron manufacturing technology;
• around 110 million transistors;
• FCBGA package;
• 300MHz chip working frequency (the final decision about it hasn’t ye been made);
• 256bit memory interface;
• 600MHz DDR memory frequency or higher;
• 128MB of memory onboard;
• 8 pixel pipelines;
• Lays up to 16 textures per single pass;
• DirectX9, Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0;
• Max. 160 instructions pixel shader length;
• Supports FPU operations at any pixel shader stage;
• Up to 10bit per channel frame buffer;
• Max. 1024 instructions vertex shader length;
• 4 vertex shader units working in parallel;
• Truform 2.0 – Displacement mapping, N-patches, polygon tessellation with smooth level change within a polygon;
• Adaptive anisotropic filtering up to 64 samples, simultaneously with tri-linear filtering;
• Smoothvision II – supersampling and multisampling up to 6 samples;
• Hyper Z III – more efficient memory bus use;
• AGP 8x;
• 2 integrated CRT-controllers;
• 2 integrated RAMDAC with up to 10bit colour precision per channel and 400MHz conversion frequency;
• Integrated TMDS-transmitter working at 165MHz;
• Integrated TV-Out unit supporting HDTV and up to 1024x768 resolutions;
• Supports Pixel shaders for video stream editing;
• Hardware Motion Compensation and iDCT.

Besides the parameters listed above, I would like to mention a few more things. Firstly, judging by this review, RADEON 9700 chip will have not two texture units per pipeline (as we have supposed before), but only 1 TMU. However, the memory controller is crossbar, though not 4x32bit as by GeForce4 Ti and GeForce3, but 4x64bit. Though this info still needs to be confirmed.

In fact, this is a really impressive chip: over 100 million transistors packed into a case with over 1000 pins. This is the first monster like that in the graphics industry. Now it’s high time we took a closer look at the performance of this new ATI wonder. As usual, AnandTech is ahead of the rest of the world with a review of the first RADEON 9700 based graphics card sample. Although these results are normalized relative to the performance of GeForce4 Ti4600, we still can get an excellent idea of the newcomer. By the way, the graphics cards worked at pretty high frequencies: n325Mhz chip and 620MHz DDR memory. I wonder if the mass graphics cards will have something of the kind or lower.

The tests were run in Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, Jedi Knight 2 and Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter. The RADEON 9700/128MB sample had to compete with NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600/128MB and Matrox Parhelia-512/128MB (the latter got here only because it is new, no other explanation).

The results were pretty clear: RADEON 9700 is an indisputable leader everywhere. Moreover, the higher is the resolution, the bigger is the advantage of the newcomer (of course, due to 256bit memory bus!). The maximum advantage over the competitors, namely over GeForce4 Ti4600 was the following: 37% in Quake3 Arena, 54% in Unreal Tournament 2003, 10% in Jedi Knight 2 and 50% in Serious Sam 2: The Second Encounter. I would like to stress that in Unreal Tournament 2003 with 4x4 anti-aliasing (see here) RADEON 9700 outperformed GeForce4 Ti4600 by 151%!!! In other words, in this benchmark RADEON 9700 was 2.51 times faster than the rival! This is really something, I should say… No other comments are necessary here. RADEON 9700 chip is an indisputable No 1 among the desktop gaming graphics chip today.

Now a few words about the shipping schedule and pricing. The company claims that the cards on RADEON 9700 will start shipping in August already. Of course, it would be really cool, but it is pretty unclear then why there is no clarity with the working frequencies still. The graphics cards on this chip alongside with the solutions on RADEON 9000/Pro will be introduced by: Connect3D, Creative Labs Asia, CP Technology Co., Ltd., Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd., Hercules Guillemot, Hightech Information Systems Ltd., Sapphire Technology Ltd., Super Grace Electronics Ltd., Tyan and Unitech Electronics Co., Ltd. And of course, by ATI itself. The recommended street price for the RADEON 9700 based cards is $399. Pretty reasonable bearing in mind the outstanding performance.