ATI Radeon 9800 Pro - Reference - Introduction - Radeon 9800 Pro

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 04/02/2003 08:00 AM [ ] 0 comment(s)

It was like what ? 6 months ago that ATI started to dominate the high-end market with their Radeon 9700 Pro. It simply shocked a lot of consumers by it's raw power. Right after the availability of ATI's competition NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra ATI decided to release yet another new graphics card. An entire new range for that matter, the Radeon 9800/Pro, Radeon 9600/Pro and Radeon 9200/Pro. Rumor in the channel for a while has been 'R350' as the new graphics core. The rumors where right, R350 was the new core and the product was to be named Radeon 9800 Pro.

It amazes me how ATI managed to advance itself way up there in that extremely competitive market. Two maybe three years ago they had a reputation of building so-so graphics cards with mostly buggy drivers and now look again, a lot has changed since then. They certainly had an answer to that. The product, as stated my friends, is the all new Radeon 9800 Pro. A highly efficient and programmable graphics card with a computational speed that is simply breathtaking.

Instead of moving towards a 0,13 Micron fabrication process, like the new 9600 and 9200 are, ATI decided it would be saver to go with the older 0.15 Micron process. I've been told by several technicians that this process can not go any further than roughly 400 MHz. ATi was clever though, they clocked R350 core at 380 MHz which leaves a little 'breathing space' on the graphics core yet is very stable and .. faster. This product will be roughly 20% faster than it's older brother the 9700 Pro.

Radeon 9800 Pro

This product, dear friends, is ATI's answer towards NVIDIA's latest and greatest. Both ATI and NVIDIA recently released newer (official) drivers. So we took the Radeon 9700 Pro, 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5800 Ultra towards our new Athlon XP 3000+ based test rig and took them through some extensive testing.

ATI or it's partners will also release a model with 256 MB memory for the true freaks among you. It's not yet known if the clock speeds for that product will remain the same. You can bet it'll be an expensive product though.

Radeon 9800 Pro - in action

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