Arghh, OK I'm lost here.....

[VulcanOrion]

I have never owned an ATI product. I have always owned nVidia (as long as I have owned computers that is). I hear of all this talk about the RV350 & R350 video cards. My question is; what is ATIs' next "big" video card? I mean I have read that the RV350 is a 9600 and that R350 is a 9800. I have also heard of the 9900 cards....what are those....? Man, I'm lost!

[Dazz]

You mean biggest video card as in feature sets or speed?
9000 (RV200) 64MB
9000Pro (RV200) 128MB
9100 (R200) 64MB or 128MB
9200 (RV280 64 or 128MB
9500 (RV300) 128MB
9500 Pro (RV300) 128MB
9600 (RV350) 128MB
9700 (R300) 128MB
9700 (R300) 128MB
9800 (R350) 128MB
9900 (R350) 256MB

[VulcanOrion]

Where did you see info on the 9900? I would like to get some info on it. I want to buy a new card here soon. But I want to get the one most up to date (at least for 3 months or so).

[Dazz]

From people mostly and a odd site www.xbitlabs.com/news it's said the 9900 is just the 9800 but with an extra 128MB of ram and a possible speed increase.

[VulcanOrion]

I gottcha Dazz. Thanks man. :) I'll check it out.

[Dazz]

Also someones posted this http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8062
AS WE'VE WRITTEN earlier, ATI's 9600 (RV350) is expected to be introduced during the course of next week, while the Radeon 9800 Pro is also close to release.
Let's recap on what we've got so far. The RV350 uses .13µ (micron) technology, uses two vertex pipes, with four pixel pipes (one TMU on each), while its core clock speed with be around 350MHz but there's room for that to grow.

The Radeon 9600 will have 64MB of 128-bit DDR memory, while the Radeon 9600 Pro will have higher clock speeds and quite possibly 128MB of memory.

These cards are much cheaper to produce than for the R300, we understand.

You won't need any additional power supply connection, and it looks like the RV350 will be pin compatible with R200, so use a much rejigged R2XX family deisgn.

As for performance, it appears that the 9600 Pro may only be between 20 per cent to 50 per cent ahead of the latest TI 4200 cards because of its inherent design.

The R350, if you recall, uses .15µ technology, has four vertex and eight pixel pipes with Smartshader 2.1 and Smoothvision 2.1. The core may be 375/350 or possible even 400/350.

Come April, we'll likely see the Radeon 9800 Pro in Europe, which is likely to give around a 20 per cent gain for modern games playing, and will include 256MB of 256-bit DDR memory.

ATI will call the extended set of DX9 features the DX9++, although we suppose it could add just as many ++++++ as it wanted to.

This includes floating point 3D textures, floating point cube maps, multiple render targets (up to 4), displacement mapping and n-patches. That was done in software for the R300 but we'll see what ATI comes up with time round the mulberry bush.

Nvidia should perhaps call its own DX9 extensions DX9## or DX9.NET.

The 350s have a very special F buffer for storing temporal pixel shader data, it allows for "virtually unlimited" pixel shader length, meaning full OpenGL 2.0 fragment shading and possibly also Renderman shaders, all in hardware.

Both have improved adaptive anisotropic filtering, improved memory controller, six times multisampling and up to 6:1 frame buffer lossless colour compression when in MSAA mode. Both have improved HyperZ III+ technology with 8x depth buffer compression.

This battle in spring will be an interesting one.

[VulcanOrion]

I saw that one as well. I wonder when the "9900 w/256MB" will be out since that is the one I'll buy.

[digitalwanderer]

Originally posted by VulcanOrion
I saw that one as well. I wonder when the "9900 w/256MB" will be out since that is the one I'll buy.


For some reason I wanna say either May or September, but I can't really remember why or how so I wouldn't count it for much.

[kyleb]

definatly not a hold your breath type thing. 256mb on a grapics card sounds like overkill to me at this point anyway.

[dohcmark8]

Me to, check out my location! :D

[MuFu]

Originally posted by Dazz
From people mostly and a odd site www.xbitlabs.com/news it's said the 9900 is just the 9800 but with an extra 128MB of ram and a possible speed increase.

Nah - that card is still called a 9800 Pro... just a very special one. ;)

MuFu.