Specification and features
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I've taken these comprehensive specifications from ATi's own site. I'd like to go through the more relevant points. 8-pixel and 4-vertex rendering pipelines give it, ceterus paribus, double the shading ability of the Ti 4600. The important point to note here is that the pixel performance of the R9700 should be similar to the Ti 4600's as the latter can process 2 textures on its 4-pixel pipes, whereas the R9700 is limited to one per pipe. The R9700 comes equipped with 8x AGP support, thus giving it a potential 2GB/s+ bandwidth from Northbridge to AGP port. The 8x support is something of a contentious issue at the moment, with a number of users reporting it to be in a non-working state. Considering that the majority of today's applications cannot saturate the 4x AGP bus, 8x can be thought of as a forward-looking measure. The advanced pixel and shading ability allow the R9700 to be defined as a DX9-class of graphics card. Smoothvision 2.0, ATi's collective term for their image-enhancement settings, now sees up to 6x F.S.A.A, and up to 16x anisotropic filtering (including trilinear), all the way up to 1600x1200x32. Ths compares favourably to the Ti4600's maximum settings of 4x F.S.A.A and 8x anisotropic filtering. Truform, ATi's in-house polygon-enhancing setting, now sees a 2nd-generation higher order surfacing support. Truform attempts to revitalise older games by fleshing out character models with the use of extra polygons. It's especially useful smoothing harsh edges on characters by simply guesstimating and adding an additional number of polygons to a low polygon model. It uses what ATi call N-Patches to achieve this. Most modern graphics cards have a hardware-assisted video acceleration chip integrated into their design. ATi, with a slight departure from this, have decided to allow the pixel shaders to control aspects of the video stream instead. The advantage of this method, according to ATi, is that it allows poor video to be artificially enhanced with the use of clever pixel shading. Although this sounds good in practice, it is only applicable in a select few circumstances. The R9700, much like the GeForce4 Ti 4600, is equipped with dual 400MHz RAMDACs. The advantage that the R9700 has over the Ti 4600, however, lies in the fact that it can use dual 10-bit RAMDACs as opposed to the 4600's 8. It's got massive memory bandwidth courtesy of its 256-bit bus and 620MHz DDR, totalling almost 20GB/s, it's fully DX-9-compliant with upgraded pixel and vertex shaders. AGP 8x support, enhanced Smoothvision, enhanced Hyper Z memory bandwidth-saving technology and 2nd-generation Truform round of the impressive hardware package. Sign in for the best HEXUS experience LOG IN
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