R9700 Oficially Announced

[druga runda]

Shipping on 19th of August

With all the specs and 325 MHZ clock!!! :D At least they will make those 399 USD a bit more worth.

Here is the link

http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2002/4523.html

[saturnotaku]

Where do you see in that press release the card will be shipping on Aug. 19?

Also, the release states the 9700 will offer "complete Microsoft® DirectX® 9 support." What exactlhy does this mean? I didn't think the DX9 spec was even finalized yet. :confused:

[druga runda]

Here is the whole thing to spare you clicking on the unholy site :D




ATI introduces RADEON™ 9700 PRO graphics board based on newly introduced VPU architecture

RADEON™ 9700 PRO delivers double the performance of any graphics card available

Wednesday, August 7, 2002




MARKHAM, ON - ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX: ATY, NASDAQ: ATYT) today announced the addition of the RADEON™ 9700 PRO graphics board, featuring the RADEON™ 9700 PRO visual processing unit (VPU), to its successful retail lineup. Based on the RADEON 9700 series VPUs introduced in July, the RADEON 9700 PRO board will deliver breakneck performance to the gaming and enthusiast market.

"In this fast paced industry, customers demand that products ship soon after announcement," said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President, Marketing and General Manager, Desktop, ATI Technologies Inc. "We are on target for our mid-August shipping date, when customers will be able to experience first hand the major innovations that the RADEON 9700 VPUs deliver to gaming and the computer graphics industry."

Featuring eight parallel rendering pipelines, complete Microsoft® DirectX® 9 support, AGP 8X support and a fully programmable floating point architecture, the RADEON 9700 PRO leads the industry into a new era of cinematic-quality real time graphics.


ATI's feature-rich RADEON 9700 PRO retail offering includes:
128MB of DDR memory;
Dual-display configuration including VGA, DVI-I and s-video connectors with independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays;
Fast engine (325MHz) and memory (620MHz) clock speeds;
CATALYST™ software support including WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) certified driver and HYDRAVISION™ desktop management software;
RADEON 9700 PRO visual processing unit featuring SMARTSHADER™ 2.0, SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0, HYPER Z™ III, and VIDEOSHADER™ technologies; and
Suggested retail price of US$399.
The RADEON 9700 PRO has been selected as the official graphics card of QuakeCon 2002. Competitors in ATI's Quake and Return to Castle Wolfenstein Tournaments will compete on systems powered by the RADEON 9700 PRO, the fastest, most feature-rich graphics solution available.

ATI will begin shipping the RADEON 9700 PRO board to retail customers and distributors beginning August 19, where it will join the recently introduced RADEON 9000 PRO, and ATI's other strong retail products in stores and online. RADEON 9700 PRO boards will be available from ATI's board partners later this month.

Other retail products based on the RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9000 architectures will be introduced later this year.



The shipping date is in bold.

[Jandar]

ATI will begin shipping the RADEON 9700 PRO board to retail customers and distributors beginning August 19, where it will join the recently introduced RADEON 9000 PRO, and ATI's other strong retail products in stores and online. RADEON 9700 PRO boards will be available from ATI's board partners later this month.

[saturnotaku]

Gotcha - I was doing something else at the time and only took a cursory glance at it.

I have been enlightened.

But that still doesn't answer my query as to this statement:

Featuring eight parallel rendering pipelines, complete Microsoft® DirectX® 9 support, AGP 8X support and a fully programmable floating point architecture, the RADEON 9700 PRO leads the industry into a new era of cinematic-quality real time graphics.

[druga runda]

Well they might have the final specs of the API and have a working implementation for it.

DX9 should be out in October and knowing that it will get installed on 50% of computers WW, I bet they have rather lenghty testing procedures just to make sure that the rollout is as clean as possible. So I believe that the beta DX9 Ati is working with is the close to final albeit some copmatibility corrections. (that will be addressed in DX9 drivers when they come out).

[Philibob]

The press release isn't about the R9700 it's the R9700 PRO.

[Spiritwalker]

One in the same

[imtim83]

I can't wait to hear how good or horrible the drivers are for the ATI 9700. I hope they are good but i am not holding my breath.
I can just see it now all kind of posts about people who brought the ATI 9700 having all kinds of problems hehe. It would be like ibm HD posts all over again just this time with video cards.

[Spiritwalker]

Considering there were no problems with the beta drivers that were used in the previews, I would say that there should be very few problems with them. There will always be some issues, but many times they are as a result of other componants in combination. But the biggest cause of most problems is on the outside of the computer.

[StealthHawk]

Originally posted by Spiritwalker
Considering there were no problems with the beta drivers that were used in the previews, I would say that there should be very few problems with them. There will always be some issues, but many times they are as a result of other componants in combination. But the biggest cause of most problems is on the outside of the computer.

as i've often stated before the forums were obliterated, i highly doubt that reviewers test the cards on any games other than those they ran benchmarks on. that doesn't constitute "no problems" exist in other games that i may play.

the fact of the matter is this, reviews are nice, but the true test is in the hands of the consumer. and until i hear of no complaints from users, i will remain uncommitted, no matter who produces the cards.

[Bigus Dickus]

The truth is that forums are typically flooded with problems during the introduction of any new graphics card. This has always been the case, and it will probably remain this way.

It sucks, but that's life.

[StealthHawk]

true, but i can usually discern the BS problems from the real problems(ie what seems to be isolated to one person, or in some cases, what people seem to make up :rolleyes: )

[netviper13]

There is no possible way to get out of the fact that, at launch, the 8500 drivers were complete pieces of crap. They crashed most people's systems, and for the ones they worked on there were many features that didn't work.

Now today the 8500 drivers are very smooth and have most of the bugs worked out. I think the first few weeks will tell if R300 will be destined to sit on the back-burner because of drivers, or hold the crown at least until NV30 arrives.

[Bigus Dickus]

Originally posted by netviper13
There is no possible way to get out of the fact that, at launch, the 8500 drivers were complete pieces of crap. They crashed most people's systems, and for the ones they worked on there were many features that didn't work.Typical blowing things out of proportion. The fact is that Smoothvision was the only feature not working in its final form (AA was there, and working, just not refined yet).

Crashed most people's systems? Yeah, I love it when people read dozens of posts about people systems crashing, and assume that the thousands upon thousands that didn't have a problem and didn't take the time to write and say so must have crashing systems as well.

Look... the 8500's release drivers weren't the greatest, but system crashing and game bugs were still isolated incidences. The drivers out just one month later corrected nearly all remaining issues. Since then, the drivers have focused primarily on performance. You act as if it has taken a year to get good drivers for the 8500, and that is simply not the case. The release drivers were good (as bug free as the detonator version I installed here on my work compter... tell me about system crashes, sheesh), the first updated ones were better, and the new ones are faster.

[SnakeEyes]

From everything I've been reading, it took quite a while to work most of the non-working feature and compatibility (for most games) problems for the 8500 out. As for performance issues, I'd say both of the major companies in question here usually take a few months after initial release of the hardware before the true performance potential starts to be realized in the drivers. But all of my nVidia cards so far seem to have all the promised features working out of the box, and practically every game works fine right away. Performance wise, there were usually increases later, allowing each card to finally stand out from its predecessor by a noticable margin (GF2Ultra - GF3, for example).

StealthHawk's point about the games that the preview card was tested with is a good one too. Most likely ATI concentrated on those titles first, and then works on other more obscure / less popular titles as time allows. Not an unreasonable strategy, but this means that until the card is in the hands of people that can try it out on more than just the favorite games and benchmarks, we just DON'T really know if they've finally had the big breakthrough in their driver development team that everyone's been crying for, which is that the drivers are basically fully functional and compatibility without problems is high, AT RELEASE. i expect performance to only improve, but I really want to see if the drivers are good all-around out of the box. Nothing worse than having some game that not many people play that I CAN'T because my card / drivers has issues, and that I'd have to wait months before I could.. ;)

------

BTW, I plan to use the same criteria with nV30, especially since it's an all-new architecture for nVidia, and I expect writing the drivers for it won't be quite as trivial as for past cards, which shared a large portion of their core designs (with additions for each generation for the new features).

[jbirney]

From everything I've been reading, it took quite a while to work most of the non-working feature and compatibility (for most games) problems for the 8500 out. As for performance issues, I'd say both of the major companies in question here usually take a few months after initial release of the hardware before the true performance potential starts to be realized in the drivers. But all of my nVidia cards so far seem to have all the promised features working out of the box, and practically every game works fine right away. Performance wise, there were usually increases later, allowing each card to finally stand out from its predecessor by a noticable margin (GF2Ultra - GF3, for example).


Hmmm
I got an 8500 the last year about 3/4 weeks after they came out. Right around Thanksgiving. I installed it fresh on a Win2k PC and since then I have not had one major issue with the card. Shure there were some bugs that got worked out (for example flashing texture in C&C Renagade). The very same day I got it, they had released their first beta drivers which fixes the Q3 issue and had working smoothvision. So for me, its been a very smooth ride. I realize that I might have gotten lucky.

For features that were not working, we had smoothvision only. And that was fixed with their first set of drivers. There was some talk about OpenGL and HperZ2 but at the time it was really hard to figure out if it was working or not. It was working fine in D3D.


If anything we can learn that ATI has vastly improved thier drivers and I doubt we will see the same thing again. Also not every NV card had good drivers. Do you remember the GF3 first reviews? Remember how nV ask to hold back the FPS numbers for a month? Also HOS support has been turned on/off in their drivers. At one time they had advertise that the GF3 can do it.

I hope ATI has learned its lesson as that will make better stuff for us all.....

[StealthHawk]

in the end, it all comes down to what games you play, doesn't it? many people who buy only very popular games(not indicating that you are one of those) will experience few problems in terms of crashing or performance.

[gilly]

Shipping on 19th of August

With all the specs and 325 MHZ clock!!! :D At least they will make those 399 USD a bit more worth.

Here is the link

http://mirror.ati.com/companyinfo/press/2002/4523.html
gillyfju41v@gmail.com

[Lfctony]

WTF!!!!??? Damn spam bots...

[Viral]

I read R700 officially announced :( Not RV770, I know, but i still got exited.