Video Card: Crucial RADEON 9800 Pro 256MB Review :: Features

• 9800 Pro Features
• SmartShader 2.1
• SmoothVision 2.1
• HyperZ III+
• 256-bit memory bandwidth bus
• 8 pixel pipelines
• F-Buffers
• 380 MHz core
• 340 MHz memory
• Pixel Shader 2.0
• Vertex Shader 2.0

ATI's 9800 Pro is a modified 9700 Pro with added features and speed. The key inflection point today is DirectX 9.0 compliance. While many other video card companies have had trouble with getting acceptable visual quality and performance with DirectX 9.0, ATI's card has always been top notch with those games.

SmartShader is ATI's codename for their pixel and vertex shaders. The pixel shader is capable of 160 instructions in a single pass and more with multi-passing. One of the keys to the performance lead ATI has in the pixel shading department is the full 8 pixel pipelines. While Nvidia cards sometimes render images with 8 pixel pipelines, there are situations where only 4 pixels are rendered.

SmoothVision is ATI's attempt to improve image quality in games and applications which have jaggies. Over the years various companies have researched where best to take samples to get the best image quality. The card is capable of up to 6 sample multi sample anti-aliasing. Often ATI's image quality looks better with AA than their competitions.

F-Buffers promises virtually unlimited fragment shader support. Unfortunately this feature isn't supported by the current 4.1 drivers released on the net by ATI very recently. It's an interesting concept, but until drivers support the features and it is used in games it's just a concept.

The 9800 Pro has a clock speed of 380 MHz for the core and 350 MHz for the memory (I don't double memory speeds as a personal preference, though everyone else does). This gives a theoretical fill rate of 3040 mega pixels a second and a memory bandwidth of 22.4 GB/second (256x2x350). Of course theoretical isn't the same as actual performance.

Microsoft developed DirectX with their Windows Operating system. DX is a graphics API (Application Programming Interface). Each new version of DirectX has added new features to the API including Hardware Transformation and Lighting, Pixel and Vertex Shader 1.1, 1.3, 1.4 and now 2.0 and other features.

ATI's 9800 Pro conforms to the Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0 standard set by DirectX 9.0. With 8 pixel pipelines capable of 5 pixel shader instructions in a clock, this outstrips Nvidia's cards by a good 3 to 1 ratio. When playing games like Half Life 2 which make extensive use of Pixel Shaders, the performance difference can be quite dramatic, as shown by ATI's Shader Day.

Drivers

ATI has really improved upon their driver writing skills from the days back when they started with the Rage Pro Turbo chip. With the Catalyst driver team releasing new drivers virtually every month, and fixes released also released when something is broken, I can safely say that it's an improvement over previous years.

Catalyst drivers were released in 2002 to a lot of fanfare. The driver team, evangelized by Terry Makedon (Catalyst Maker), is committed to regular monthly driver updates and improving upon the stability, performance and compatibility of ATI drivers.

In the games I tried with the new 4.1 drivers I only found a couple of issues with the drivers. In the Far Cry demo, FSAA is broken as noted in the Readme text included with the demo. Thankfully the game really doesn't need FSAA to look pretty. The graphics are simply astounding. DirectX 9 games that make use of Pixel and Vertex Shaders have shown problems with FSAA, hopefully this can be rectified in future DX9 games, as this card should be powerful enough to run Far Cry with AA.

Previous issues with Prince of Persia Sands of Time and anti-aliasing showing artifacts have been resolved. That's a very nice thing about the driver team's commitment to fix issues promptly. There is a list of issues on the 4.1 driver readme that are unresolved, but those are mainly minor.

On Crucial's website there is a link to ATI drivers which leads to the 7.90 driver suite. As ATI is now on 7.97 drivers, this is a bit old. However, no issues with using the 7.97 Cat 4.1 drivers were found throughout the testing of this card. So if you have a Crucial Powered By ATI card, be assured the latest reference drivers work just fine with this card.