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ATi Radeon 9700 Pro Benchmarks

We show what the 9700 Pro is capable of on a Pentium 4 2.53GHz, an AMD 2.5GHz, an AMD 1.5GHz and throw in the Ti4600 for competition and the Parhelia just for fun.

Introduction:

Most of us have certainly heard of the upcoming ATi Radeon 9700 Pro. We have already written a couple of articles covering it ourselves here last month. To follow that up, this morning we are finally going to be able to share hard and fast numbers with you on benchmarking the new ATi Radeon 9700 Pro.

If you are not up on the technology behind the Radeon 9700, I would suggest you give our online white paper article a read as it will spell out the tech used in pretty much layman's terms. Also, we have another article online that gives our subjective thoughts about gameplay on the Radeon 9700 Pro.

This article will focus on 9700 Pro performance and what it delivers when we are using all those nifty features that come with it, like 4X Antialiasing and 16X Anisotropic Filtering.

The Card:

It is worth noting that the core and memory speeds we experienced last month on the ATi test system are exactly what has come to pass. 325MHz core and 620MHz DDR clocks are both standard on the "Pro" card. Count on the non-Pro cards to be clocked a bit slower, but as of right now we are not sure what those numbers will be held to by ATi.

This card will also have a suggested retail price of US$399. The Radeon 9700 Pro is not meant to fill the needs of the mainstream video card buyer out there. It is meant to be sold to the guys that live, breath and sleep either hardware or gaming...or both.

Above are shots of the retail product that we reviewed. The card measures only about 7 inches long and less than 4 inches high compared to a GeForce4 Ti4600 at 8.5 inches long and about the same height. This of course will please many of you out there concerned with air flow in your cases.

Testing:

The card also supports AGP8X although at the time of testing the card we were not able to get the card stable on either a SiS 648 or VIA P4X400 mainboard. All of the benchmarks shown here are using a AGP4X bus. While this will of course give a bit of a performance hit in some applications, from our testing the differences at this time with these particular games and benchmarks, it is nominal at best.

It has been a very busy week for us here at HardOCP as we have had tons of responsibilities to take care of, but we managed to run over 280 separate gaming benchmarks with the 9700 Pro, the Ti4600, and the Parhelia. We have taken what we think to be the most important benchmarks and put them together here in what we hope to be a digestible format.

We have tested the card on a Pentium 4 2.53GHz system and also an AMD 2.485GHz system. The AMD numbers were done on a yet-to-be-announced CPU based on the Thoroughbred core. We also realize that not everyone can afford a top end CPU of this nature, especially if they just shelled out US$400 for a VidCard, so we have also run our benchmarks on an AthlonXP at 1.53GHz.

While this article is going to focus on the card's benchmark numbers, we are planning a follow up article that addresses the visual quality of the 9700 Pro in a more in-depth manner.