Radeon 9800 (R350) Pro Review @ Driverheaven

ToshiroOC · Mar 6, 2003, 12:10 AM

Recently a Radeon 9800 Pro (r350) was sent to Driverheaven for reviewing purposes. It gives me great pleasure to announce the Driverheaven Radeon 9800 Pro Review, written by Allan "Zardon" Campbell.

It's been a great six months for ATI, since the release of the 9700 Pro they have dominated the high end mainstream market, superseding Nvidia's 4600 by a long shot. The combined value for money and the outright performance, specifically with FSAA and aniso enabled, shot it to the number one position with die hard gamers the world over. It's no surprise that ATI recently released news that they shipped their millionth Direct X 9 class graphics card. As we all know Nvidia's FX really did fail to hit the big time, with suprisingly average performance for such a long delayed product, the shock was only reinforced by the horrendous noise problems.

Over the last six months, the designers of the Radeon 9700 pro looked back at all areas of the chip to identify areas where timings and signal integrity could be improved. The result of this work, the Radeon 9800 PRO, features a highly optimised design that is able to run at significantly higher clock speeds than its predecessor, without the need for large, noisy cooling solutions.

There is currently only one configuration of 9800 available, that being 128 meg of DDR with VGA, DVI-I and TVOUT. Core and memory speeds on the new card are 380/680 respectively. Unlike the FX, the 9800 like its predecessor uses a 256-bit DDR memory interface, this removes hardware performance bottlenecks and provides end users with faster graphics performance. The 9800 pro also supports the new universal AGP 3.0 8x specification, which allows larger volumes of texture and vertex data to be transferred faster from system memory to the chip. The 9800 pro VPU offers dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400MHZ DACS. No PCI version is available, so don't even ask. Memory on the card isn't upgradeable. 256 Meg configurations will be introduced beginning in the second quarter.

Looking back over the review, I perhaps didnt have the time alloted (under 2 days) for me to cover every single aspect that I would have liked. One massive headache and too many benchies later I at least managed to get something from the experience. I learned that no-one has any proven ground to complain about ATI drivers anymore, they really are rock solid, with no graphical artifacts on any of the benches I ran. No hard locks, no crashing, nadda. This was straight out of the box with early drivers supplied to me directly from Terry Makedon.

Enough FXing about -- the 9800 pro is one serious piece of hardware from a serious company.

Read more of this excellent review here!

We also have three screenshots from the still unreleased GLExcess OpenGL benchmarking program sucessor, GLExcess 2 on this page of the review. GLExcess is due for a Q4 2003 release.

toddsmack2k · Mar 6, 2003, 12:23 AM

Excellent review. The 9800 will be just another stepping stone in the success of ATI

Dom · Mar 6, 2003, 12:31 AM

Not a big difference from the 9700 Pro. But enough to beat the 5800 Ultra in every field.

cts519 · Mar 6, 2003, 12:41 AM

I wonder what performance benefit 256 megs is going to make?

What games are going to leverage that amount of memory?

I'm gonna wait until the .13 VPU and GDDR cards come out before I dump my 9700 PRO.

It still has some juice in it.

...anyone want to buy a Nvidia G4 4400 cheap?

Mystik · Mar 6, 2003, 01:50 AM

You know. The 9800 Pro is making me wanna stab
a few eyes, cut a few tendons and step on a few
people.

Yeah.

Vampyromaniac · Mar 6, 2003, 03:31 AM

Very nicely done

Any word on when it will be shipped?
Err, I meant like: before May? before April? or any ballpark date

merry · Mar 6, 2003, 04:32 AM

There is an article at tomshardware. It appears all the 9xxx line is being replaced with the improved architecture, as follows:

9700 -> 9800 ($399)
9500pro -> 9600pro ($169-$199)
9500 -> 9600 ($149-$169)
9000pro -> 9200pro ($129-$149)
9000 -> 9200 (DX 8.1)

According to the article, all are due April 2003.

EDIT: Also, the 9600 is ATI's first chip in 0.13u, @400MHz core

boby · Mar 6, 2003, 04:33 AM

very good review and another bomb to nVidia.i have one question,will 9800 demos played on 9500pro?

***Zardon*** · Mar 6, 2003, 05:31 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by cts519
I wonder what performance benefit 256 megs is going to make?

What games are going to leverage that amount of memory?

nothing atm, but in it wont take games long to utilise the additional memory. Doom 3 already uses 90+ meg of texture memory.

~~JAV~~ · Mar 6, 2003, 05:33 AM

NICE!

Congrats on the opportunity for one of the 1st reviews! Says a lot for DH Admin & Staff & the big Z himself!

Take a bow all!

[Lemme go read it now & I'll be back w/a review of the review. he he

]

This is bad@$$! You have any input on this Z?

***craig5320*** · Mar 6, 2003, 10:52 AM

No that is the shield ATI provided I jus' put it on the DH colour background

Mystik · Mar 6, 2003, 11:19 AM

They should make small pins of that shield for people
to stick on their bags and whatnot..

And of Cerberus (or the three-headed dog) and all
the other logos too.. that'd be pretty neat.

***Zardon*** · Mar 6, 2003, 01:34 PM

well after working today I decided to try some overclocking. and ive been pretty amazed at the headroom on this card.

I hit 440 core and 780 mem with a few artifacts. 430 core and 770 mem stable.

3dmark2001 nature test, 150FPS average, seeing peaks of 240fps.

3dmark2003, 6050 final score. very impressive.

FuNsTeR · Mar 6, 2003, 03:08 PM

i don't like the idea of a normal power connector going into the card as i have a 2 x 60 gig maxtor Hard Drives and a dvd rom and a liteon rewriter ... its just crazy ... might upgrade to a 9700 pro as the price plummets

~~craig588~~ · Mar 6, 2003, 03:52 PM

*quickly brings his r9700pro to 380/340*

Is this equivalant to the r9800pro or are there other optimizations done to it?

digitalwanderer · Mar 6, 2003, 04:10 PM

Congratulations! You made the number 1 comment sorted by post score on /. for the 9800 review comments.

You can see it for yourself here.

Erroneus · Mar 6, 2003, 04:10 PM

the core has been optimized/tweaked, if you run a 9800 at same speed as a 9700, it will beat it in fsaa/AA tests.

~~craig588~~ · Mar 6, 2003, 04:27 PM

Oh, ok I thought they were just tweaks to get the core clock faster.

edperks · Mar 6, 2003, 05:46 PM

Congrats!! Great Review with great pics and Benchies, Its is impresive to see ATI trusting Driverheaven with such a great task. Good Going Zardon

Desert_Siege · Mar 6, 2003, 08:50 PM

Hmmmm....friend has already been eyeballing my 9700. Maybe time for "upgrade" again...heh.

Nice review and impressive tweaks. It just keeps getting better for ATI. Ahhh crap...I think I stepped in some Nvidia on the way in, hope it comes out of the carpet...hehe

UberLord · Mar 6, 2003, 09:00 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by cts519
I wonder what performance benefit 256 megs is going to make?

What games are going to leverage that amount of memory?

There's a rumour floating around http://www.beyond3d.com that UT2003 has super high res textures that only get used when you have a 256meg card ........

The rumour was posted there a few months back so GL finding it!

UberLord · Mar 6, 2003, 09:02 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by digitalwanderer
Congratulations! You made the number 1 comment sorted by post score on /. for the 9800 review comments.

You can see it for yourself here.

My karma is good at /. - how's yours?