Date:
Tuesday , March 25, 2003
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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9700 Pro vs. 9800 Pro

We take the two cards and compare them clock for clock and also take the soon-to-be released benchmark from UbiSoft's Splinter Cell for a drive.

Introduction:

The Radeon 9800 Pro was announced and reviewed almost three weeks ago. The Radeon 9800 Pro uses the newest VPU core from ATI which is codenamed R350. The 9700/Pro and 9500/Pro are based on the R300 VPU for comparison. Also announced three weeks ago was the 9600/Pro, based on the RV350 VPU and the 9200/Pro based on the RV280 VPU. With this month coming to an end, we are close to seeing 9800 Pros in stores on shelves as well as online. With April approaching many are wondering if they should get the 9800 Pro now, or perhaps wait a little bit and see how things turn out, especially with the impending arrival of the 256MB 9800 Pro. While all we can do right now is wait to hear on that one, we can explore the 9800 Pro a little bit more in the meantime since we have one to play with.

One bit of testing we did not do in our initial review was to clock the 9800 Pro down to 9700 Pro clock speeds and benchmark them clock for clock. By doing this we can see if there are any hardware improvements at all that increase AA, AF, Pixel Shader, or Vertex Shader performance in games and tests.

Focus:

This article will strictly focus on performance comparisons between the 9700 Pro and the 9800 Pro at the exact same core and memory clock speeds. There have been many arguments about improvements from the R300 to R350 core and we thought it would be interesting to look at both cards on an equal clock and memory setting. If you want a complete review of the 9800 Pro please read our Radeon 9800 Pro Review. Here is a list of bullet points that outline the 9800 changes"

  • SMARTSHADER 2.1 – Which gives the 9800 Pro beyond DX9 specs which ATI is calling DX9++. An F-Buffer has been introduced in the R350 core which allows long shader programs to be run much faster then previously and also gives unlimited pixel shader support allowing for a true OpenGL 2.0 compliant VPU.

  • SMOOTHVISION 2.1 – Which is the AA/AF component of the 9800 Pro. This newer version has hardware enhancement of the memory controller for improved AA/AF performance at higher resolutions.

  • HyperZ III+ - Which is their Z-Culling technique. The Z-Cache has been enhanced to better handle stencil buffer data for features like shadow volumes.

  • The core has been tweaked to allow for higher stable clock speeds.

Going Head to Head

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Both cards are all set to go, ready to give it their best. Aren’t they so pretty together like that. It sort of makes you yearn for the days of SLI. Maybe PCI Express will bring that back to reality with multiple AGP slots being an option?

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Powerstrip reported the 9700 Pro at a default core clock of 324 MHz and a memory clock of 310.50 MHz. Rage3D Tweak also confirmed these settings. Therefore the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro were both tested at these speeds. I used Powerstrip to downclock the 9800 Pro to 324 MHz core and 310.50 MHz memory. They are all set, ready to go.

Test Setup

Asus A7N8X Deluxe, Athlon XP Barton 2500+ @ (12.5x166) = 2800+ (2.083Ghz), 2 X 256MB Corsair XMS3500 C2 (Dual Channel DDR333), Maxtor 40GB ATA/133. Windows XP Professional SP1 with DirectX 9.

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro – Operating at downclocked speeds (324/310.50) using driver version Catalyst 3.2.

ATI Radeon 9700 Pro - Operating at default clock speeds (324/310.50) using driver version Catalyst 3.2.

Driver Setup:

In our initial review of the 9800 Pro we used Catalyst 3.1 Packaging 7.83 for the 9700 Pro and a supplied Catalyst 3.1 Packaging version 7.84 for the 9800 Pro. The only difference was that the drivers supplied with the 9800 Pro had the correct INF file to detect and install correctly on the 9800 Pro. For this review we are using the absolute latest driver version available from ATI, Catalyst 3.2 Packaging 7.84 for both video cards. This driver detects and installs correctly on the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro. Installation was simple, download driver, double click icon, let it install and reboot.

We know that some people are ‘hacking’ 9800 Pro drivers to work on 9700 Pro’s giving you a small speed boost. This article does not reflect that. We are simply using the exact same driver Catalyst 3.2 for both cards, which detected both for what they were and installed normally, just as many end users would if they were installing the cards on their own system.