ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card

Company: ATI Technologies
Product: Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
Street Price: ~$399 USD
Date Reviewed: October 19, 2002
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Rating: (9/10)

Introduction:

There are many new games that are coming out, or that are already out, that have some great graphics but are tough on video cards and can sometimes be too much for your average video card to process. Many gamers want all the frames that they can get, but not at the loss of visual quality / eye candy. With games like Unreal Tournament 2003, it is hard to find a video card that can run through the whole game smoothly with high detailed graphics and at high resolutions. NVIDIA released the GeForce 4's to accommodate the gamers as well as the everyday average user. The GeForce 4's in general are very fast, and up until now the best performing card on the market. ATI has responded with the Radeon 9700 graphics card which was hyped up for quite some time before the release. Surprisingly the Radeon 9700 doesn't just try to play catch-up with the GF4's, it leaves them in the dust, as you will see later in this review.

Upon opening the package, the first thing that I noticed was a large label on the electrostatic bag that contained the video card. It said that the 9700 required an extra power connection from the computer's power supply, as opposed to just the power that it receives from the AGP slot. I found this interesting as the GeForce 4 Ti4600 had nothing like this even with its gargantuan size. Obviously, this means that the card draws some serious power and requires more than other video cards. This set the tone for me, as it gave me the impression that this card was a beast.

What you get:

• Radeon 9700 Graphics Card
• Drivers CD and software
• Composite and s-video cables
• S-video to composite adapter
• DVI to VGA Dongle
• User Manual
• Power Connector

Key Features:

• 8 Parallel Rendering Pipelines
• 4 Parallel Geometry Engines
• 256-bit DDR Memory
• 128MB DDR Memory
• Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and the Latest OpenGL Functionality
• AGP 8x Support
• SMARTSHADER 2.0 Technology - allows users to experience complex, movie-quality effects in next-generation 3D games and applications.
• SMOOTHVISION 2.0 Technology - technology provides new levels of image quality with advanced full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering. That is, this technology enhances image quality by removing jagged edges and bringing out fine texture detail, without compromising performance. Floating-point color precision allows for a greater range of colors and brightness.
• HYPER Z III Technology
• TRUFORM 2.0 Technology
• VIDEOSHADER Engine - a seamless integration of pixel shaders with video. The RADEON™ 9700 VPU also offers FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology that removes blocky artifacts (noise removal filtering) for captured video and provides sharper image quality.
• FULLSTREAM Technology - The latest advancement in video processing technology, is a hardware accelerated filtering method that improves the performance and visual quality of streaming video playback.
• DVD Video Playback
• Dual Monitor Support
• DVI-I Support
• Video Output

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