Conclusions
So what can we conclude performance wise compared to the previous king of the hill? It's quite obvious that the masses of extra memory bandwidth and the pixel fillrate advantage are helping to push the card past Ti4600 in the higher resolutions. In cases where there are more than 8 texture passes per frame, Radeon 9700 Pro will be a whole lot quicker. DooM III springs to mind, it should wipe the floor with Ti4600 when running DooM III code. 8 texture pipelines, even with only one texture unit per pipeline are the key to its performance here and the ability to do 16 texture passes per clock will help in future titles.
In terms of future performance and a possible clash with NV30 it will rely on the 4 shader units to eek out as much performance in DX9 titles, although we might see a GPU refresh from ATI to compete with NV30 in the future.
At the present time, there's nothing to touch it. Crank up the resolution, enable aniso filtering and a little AA and the Radeon 9700 Pro will eat a Ti4600 and spit out the remains, nicely rendered of course.
At 1024x768 with no extra features enabled, save your money and get a Ti4xxx of some description and clock it to decent levels. But if you value high res gaming and want it to look gorgeous, Radeon 9700 Pro is the only choice. Aniso filtering kills Ti performance too much, especially at high resolution. Don't expect that to be the case with NV30 however.
Have Sapphire done the card justice? Absolutely. While I didn't recieve a full box kit, the bundle should be decent and price should be very competitive.
While I focussed on the technology more than Sapphire's implementation of it (it is my first Radeon 9700 Pro review after all), be rest assured that the Sapphire is a decent choice if you can find it. The cooler sets it apart.
Sapphire will have a fight on their hands to get this card back, it will grace my personal system for as long as possible.
Pro's
• Performance
• Performance
• Future proofing with DX9 class titles
• Decent cost compared to its peers
Con's
• Overkill unless you enable aniso and AA
• Currently the most expensive card on the market
Overall Score
9/10
Thanks
Huge thanks to Sapphire's PR company for hooking me up with the sample
