Radeon 9700 WHOAAAA!!!!

_CreeD_

Is that actually confirmed, or one of those amazing speculative leaks whereby someone roughly doubles what's already there?
Theres always a cost for FSAA, Nvidia have been claiming it will be practically free in each version of their card that's come out since the V3 - unless of course you get a flatpanel monitor and run it below max resolution, one hardware resize later you've got free FSAA .

Clinical Waste

Anyways, back to the new Radeon9700.

The power requirements of the chip plus memory will be higher than what ATi wants to run through the AGP-slot. Therefore, Radeon 9700 cards will have an extra floppy drive-size power connector, to avoid a too close resemblance to 3dfx's good old Voodoo5 cards.

This could be messy?

Gerry

get a molex power plug or floppy power connector, plug it into the card. The card comes with a passthrough connector so you don't lose any power plugs. I don't see the problem.

TacT

some very nifty os tweaks can be found here as well

Doodee

Zero performance cost using 4X FSAA

im sorry, Ryanair's new Flight school now offers scholarships to Pigs I hear.

(Codename eagle + Radeon 8500 + WinXP Pro, eh JP? Eh? EH? )

Actually worked perfectly John,
After the Lan I had to do a Re-install of XP pro and it was working grand again, turns out that my XP pro I was using at the lan was a bit on the borked side of things, possibly a few corrupted .dll's


As reguards this new Rad, It is definitly gonna be worth it, Anandtech tested it with the catalyst drivers that are released with the card (afaik they are catalyst but to be honesty was too busy to check exact Details) and it was outperforming the Ti4600's no bother.

Also remember that N-vidia wont be releasing their NV30 chip till November/december, afaik thats the next qauter. so more than likely this new Rad should be the card produced to compete with the current cards, not the upcoming NV30, well no...its a mix of both really. They are the first major Card supplier to release an AGP 8x card (VIA was it already?). If ur thinking that this card will outperform the NV30 though u may/maynot be wrong, who knows. the card can definitly Award itself with a golden Star and a tin foil hat against the current crop......

what im mean here is that if u buy one of these cards you should be set till December, but the point is Why bother, the Radeon 8500/ GF3 and GF4 cards are all well able to handle the upcoming Doom titles and also the UT2003 so there is really no point in having all that performance unless u want to boast (or compensate for your incredibly small cock size)

BKtje

or if like me you have a geforce256 which wont run said titles
or if your an online gamer where fps and ping are everything.

There are reasons to buy this card for some

astrofool

good time for graphics, it's a bit like when AMD released the athlon a couple of years ago, and intel had to respond by moving it's roadmap twice as fast and cut all the prices.

New Radeon isn't using catalyst drivers yet, they hope it will be soon, but whether it is actually a unified driver, or just the two drivers bolted together in the same package remains to be seen.

The NV30 will be 10-20% faster than the 9700, but it's still a good few months away. Also the idea of a multi chip solution seems messy and expensive, especially when nvidia were the first to do it all on one chip as it were (2d/3d), if anything they should be looking towards more integration, ram on chip etc. External T&L was the way 3dfx was gonna do it. But it means bringing another bus onto the graphics board, which will have bandwidth limits far less than what is capable on chip (esp. with 300 million + polygons per second flying about). Trying to combine that with 900mhz ram and keep costs of manufacturing down ? hmm, doesn't sound like what nvidia would do, and smells more like what 3dfx were desperately trying before they collapsed.

64-bit colour might happen, but 128-bit won't quite yet (that's a possible 2^128 colours on screen at once or 3.4028236692093846346337460743177e+38 colours )

16 textures/pixels per pass is the minimum for a dx9 compliant part, and the radeon already has this.

Hopefully what this will really mean is a price war with graphics cards

JustHalf

I don't like the smell of that last post.

_CreeD_

128bit colour is for precision, not colour depth. There are some examples up on Anandtech I think, looks pretty nifty actually.

JustHalf

That's not what I was talking about.