|
|
Date: |
October
5th, 2002 |
| Type: |
Review |
| Supplier: |
Guillemot
|
| Author: |
mayhem |
| RRP: |
$389
AUS |
Introduction:
With the new
Radeon 9700 Pro being the hype of the video card market at this time,
many people are overlooking the new 9000 and 9000 pro that are also on
offer, these cards are aimed at the more budget end of the market with
similar specs to that of the not so old Radeon 8500 and the low end of
the GeForce 4 Ti market.
Technology:
The first new noticeable technology feature of the Radeon 9000 is full
DirectX 8.1 support, with programmable vertex and pixel shaders. As
with most ATi based cards there is multiple monitor support available
combined with the inbuilt TV-Out chip which is capable of resolutions
upto 1024x768.
The card features
four pixel pipelines, each capable or processing two textures per pipe
and six textures per pass. With "SmoothVision" there are FSAA
sampling rates of 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and 6x, this allows you to customise
the your system on a performance vs. quality perspective, giving you full
control of the card via the advanced display properties.
| Product
Overview |
| Graphics Processor |
ATi Radeon 9000
Pro |
| Memory |
64MB DDR Memory |
| Memory Clock
Speed |
275 MHz |
| Core Clock Speed |
275 MHz |
| Bus |
AGP |
| Supported API(s) |
DirectX 8.1
& OpenGL 1.3
|
| Features: |
DVI and TV-Out |
| Options |
128MB version
available |
Features:
High-resolution
TV/Video Output to display up to 1024x768 on NTSC & PAL TV sets.
VIDEO IMMERSION II
technology for high quality playback of DVD movies with minimal CPU
resources
FULLSTREAM technology
for accelerated hardware de-blocking of RealVideo video streams
Hardware HDTV
decoder (iDCT & Motion Compensation), MPEG-2 decoder, Adaptive Per Pixel
De-Interlacing
HYDRAVISION flexible
management of the display on multiple screens
SMARTSHADER technology
for full DirectX 8.1 hardware support in games (Pixel Shaders 1.4 & Vertex
Shader 1.1) and OpenGL 1.3.
HYPERZ II bandwidth-saving
technology
CHARISMA ENGINE II,
accelerator engine for Transformation, Clipping & Lighting
SMOOTHVISION
technology to improve image quality, featuring Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic
filtering
TRUFORM, the revolutionary
solution to smooth 3D shapes edges
Hercules know-how
in hardware combined with ATI's next generation Radeon 9000 Pro graphics
processor result in this AGP board providing impressive 3D rendering in
complex, texture-rich games 64MB of fast, high quality DDR RAM for impressive
performance in all graphics applications, especially for massive texturing.
As you can see above
the card conforms to Hercules "Blue" theme of PCB design, with
the blue PCB, blue orb like fan and even blue ram sinks this card not
only performs but also looks the part, this is good for people these days
with window kits and neons as the card will look far from ordinary in
your setup.
One good thing to
see is that the Radeon 9000 Pro card doesn't require as much power as
its bigger brother the 9700 Pro, this means that there is no additional
power connections required in order to supplier the correct amount of
power to the card.
With a standard monitor
connection, a TV-Out S-Video connection and finally a DVI connector (with
converter for standard monitor connection) you can really tell its an
ATi based card. This is always one of the advantages, all ATi based cards
come with dual monitor support as standard (but unfortunately adds a bit
to the price tag).
Its interesting to
see that the 3D Prophet 9000 Pro comes with ramsinks, something that is
one of the first mods people do to their video card in order to get the
best overclocking results. This is the sort of thing that we would have
really liked to see on the ATi Radeon 9700 Pro that we recently reviewed
here.
NEXT: Testing
and Performance
|
Linuxathome.net
- Linux news and help for home broadband internet users
