Another item in the r300 design was eight 128-bit floating point pixel rendering pipelines. As comparison the Radeon 8500 and the GeForce4 make use of four 64-bit pipelines. This also explains the need for the huge transistor count. Again this is DirectX9 specification. The big advantage here translates itself into a very high fillrate and gives it a lead over the competition. Of course there is support for Pixel Shaders also and it's a version 2.0, again this is part of the DirectX9 specification. There are several changes/additions in the specification, however not very interesting stuff for the common readers. Basically things like instructions, data type, data precision and render targets have increased or improved.

Other major improvements entail Multisampling, improved Anisotropic filtering, HyperZ III and what I think can become very interesting video data through the 3D Pipeline. So no longer you would have to use overlay also you can handle multiple videostream at the same time with ease. We'll go in depth into the features in our final review.

May I introduce the Radeon 9700 Pro ?

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro - Front

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro - As you can see the card needs extra power from the power supply.

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro - backside

ATi Radeon 9700 Pro - Samsung memory

The external power supply connectors up-close.