Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9800 Pro

Company: Sapphire
Product: Atlantis 9800 Pro
Street Price: ~$405
Date Reviewed: June 19, 2003
Reviewed By: Joey Chao

Introduction:

Just the other day we reviewed the Sapphire Atlantis 9600 Pro video card. Today we look at another card from Sapphire, the Atlantis Radeon 9800 Pro. This card is much faster than the 9600 Pro mainly because of the eight rendering pipelines versus the four found on the 9600 Pro. Another major factor making this card considerably faster than the 9600 Pro is that fact that the 9800 Pro uses a 256-bit DDR interface compared to the 9600's 128-bit. The clock speed of this card is 380/340 and is one of the fastest video cards on the market next to the bigger brother 9800 Pro 256MB version.

Once again we do not have any of the enthusiast level NVIDIA cards like the FX5900 Ultra or the FX5800 Ultra to compare our sample against the fastest from NVIDIA. From reading other reviews and articles, it is a tight race between the FX5900 Ultra but the downsides to the NVIDIA card are the large heat sink that takes up two PCI slots and the GeForce FX5900 Ultra is a much bigger card in terms of length. The ATi solution is much more reasonable and also ATi's new 256MB version gives ATi a little edge on the 5900 ultra.

With all that being said let us take a look at Sapphire's 9800 Pro and see how they have bundled this video card and also take a look at the performance. We are sure you won't be disappointed with this graphics card.

Specifications:

• Eight parallel rendering pipelines
• Four parallel geometry engines
• 256-bit DDR memory interface
• AGP 8X support
• SMARTSHADER™ 2.1
  • Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
  • 2.0 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 65,280 instructions with flow control
  • 2.0 Pixel Shaders support up to 16 textures per rendering pass
  • New F-buffer technology supports pixel shader programs with unlimited instructions
  • 128-bit, 64-bit & 32-bit per pixel floating point color formats
  • Multiple Render Target (MRT) support
  • Shadow volume rendering acceleration
  • Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® via extensions
• SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
  • 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
  • Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
    • Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options
• HYPER Z™ III+
  • 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
  • Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
  • Fast Z-Buffer Clear
  • Z cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering
• TRUFORM™ 2.0
  • 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
  • Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
  • Displacement mapping
• VIDEOSHADER™
  • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
  • FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
  • Noise removal filtering for captured video
• MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
• YPrPb component output
• Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
• Dual integrated display controllers
• Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
• Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant and HDCP ready)
• Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
• Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!
• Windows® Logo Program compliant