GPU and Rendering Features
A lot has been made of the features the Radeon 9700 Pro gives you so they are worth talking about. The first and maybe most important is the full DirectX 9 compatibility, the first commercially available full DirectX 9 accelerator, out of the blocks way before the release of DirectX 9 itself.
DirectX 9 compatibility is focussed most on the adoption of a new set of shader specifications to further improve on the DirectX 8 shader specification and allow for a bigger abstraction of the shader hardware on the card to make it easier for 3D programmers to use it.
Rather than go into detail about DirectX 9, take a look at this page here at Tech Report which talks about DX9, the new 2.0 shader specs, pixel and colour precision and what Radeon 9700 Pro implements to achieve full compatibility. Damage did a good job with that article and it's worth the read.
So you get full DX9 compatibility on Radeon 9700 Pro, something Ti4600 can't manage, especially with regard to the new shader specifications that let you have shader programs with 1000+ instructions (something I covered in my look at NVIDIA's Cg shader language). Radeon 9700 Pro has no such problems.
So SMARTSHADER 2.0 (got to be in capital letters otherwise ATI get antsy) takes care of next generation shader compatibility.
SMOOTHVISION 2.0 (mind those capital letters again!) is ATI's antialiasing and texture filtering implementation, something we'll take a look at nearer the end of the review. ATI does multisample anti aliasing (they did supersampling in Radeon 8500) on Radeon 9700 Pro much like NVIDIA with GeForce4 Ti and we'll talk about performance and implementation a little later on.
VIDEOSHADER, something oft talked about but never witnessed serves to let you manipulate (in realtime no less, something usually the preserve of expensive dedication video processors) an incoming or outgoing video stream by using the shader hardware on the GPU. You can do fancy (and pretty redundant) stuff like image warps, fades and colour effects but its real power is in cleaning up a video scene using techniques usually reserved for your games with image filtering and anti-aliasing.
Given that your usual video stream is pretty low resolution, even hardware accelerated there's a lot of spare performance left on the GPU when displaying and capturing video streams so that performance can be used with VIDEOSHADER (and FULLSTREAM another related tech).
A quick note on non 3D card features
As well as all powerful 3D hardware, Radeon 9700 Pro cards also improve on Radeon 8500 in terms of getting pictures out of the card and onto a display device.
Taking a look at the back of the card and the outputs it carries gives you a clue on what the cards can do for you in terms of output.
Dual head capability as standard from a regular DSUB analogue connector and DVI-I (that can also serve an analogue head via a convertor) via a pair of highly strung (400MHz frequency) RAMDAC's. TV-Out from a new TV processor (on the GPU) and also a TMDS for driving the digital display on the DVI-I port.
The TV processor is capable of capturing video too as you'll see from the extra pins on the port (usually only 4 with regular output only TV-Out connectors).
AGP8X brings up the rear. While there's lots of talk about Radeon 9700 Pro and AGP8X, until I have an AGP8X supporting platform under the hood, I'll pass on any comment.
So what do Sapphire do with this bewildering range of technology? What's their take on Radeon 9700 Pro?
