ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card

Company: ATI Technologies
Product: Radeon 9700 Pro Video Card
Street Price: ~$399 USD
Date Reviewed: October 19, 2002
Reviewed By: Joey C. aka Chong345
Rating: (9/10)

Testing (cont):

Code Creatures was used in the same format as in the other tests with the resolutions and AA/AF being turned on and off. Code Creatures gives two scores, one is Frames per Second (FPS) and the other is Polygons per Second (PPS). The Polygons are in millions.

Let me start by saying Code Creatures was definitely the most brutal test on the cards. Watching this test was like pulling teeth as the graphics were skipping along. You can tell by the low frame rates just how hard this test actually was in comparison to the others. The GeForce 4 made it through all the tests without any problems. The Radeon, on the other hand, could not run with AA/AF turned on at 1600x1200. I do not know exactly why the card refused to run the test but it just would not, I'm guessing this could be a driver issue. Either way, you can still see that the Radeon 9700 is a faster card than the GeForce 4 and that overclocking it does help to increase the performance by a good margin.

Conclusions:

It is not very hard to see that the new king is the Radeon 9700. It completely blew away the GeForce 4 in almost every test. In most cases, the Radeon still scored higher than the GeForce 4 at the same resolutions except that the Radeon had AA/AF turned on and the GeForce did not. The Radeon also seemed to like it when Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were turned on because it really got a chance to shine. This is an amazing card overall, it has some nice features and performs very well. Overclocking the card seemed to help a lot on all of the tests especially the harder ones with AA set to 4x and AF at 8x. The card did not mind the higher resolutions either and performed even better.

The price on the card is not bad considering it is about the same price as what the Ti4600 was when it first came out. The price will eventually fall with time, and when newer video cards come out. Therefore, for now, yes, this card is the best on the market but also the most expensive as most would expect. If you do not quite have enough money for the Radeon 9700, then the GeForce 4's are nice but do not perform anywhere near what the Radeon can do at high resolutions with Anisotropic Filtering and Anti-Aliasing.

A special thanks to ATI Technologies for sending the card to review.

Pros:
  Performs great
  Fastest card available
  Nice features such as Dual Monitor

Cons:
  Expensive (but it's the best)
  No software bundle except the drivers
  Must plug in an extra power cable (not really a con)

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