R9700Pro

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Hi.Are these any good? I ask as it seems they were only made for a short
while and are not freely available now. Everywhere seems to have either
9600's or 9800's.
 
Spammy said:
Hi.Are these any good? I ask as it seems they were only made for a short
while and are not freely available now. Everywhere seems to have either
9600's or 9800's.
Click to expand...


Don't let the numbers fool you.. the 9700 is from the previous generation of
cards and was the flagship model. It's still a very quick card (much
quicker than the 9600 series) but doesn't support the newest directx stuff.
They were up until recently one of the best value for money cards if you
could still find them?!

Simon
 
Spammy Sammy said:
Hi.Are these any good? I ask as it seems they were only
made for a short while and are not freely available now.
Everywhere seems to have either 9600's or 9800's.
Click to expand...

9500 updated to 9600
9700 updated to 9800

just newer models of older cards
 
Spammy Sammy kirjoitti:
Hi.Are these any good? I ask as it seems they were only made for a short
while and are not freely available now. Everywhere seems to have either
9600's or 9800's.
Click to expand...
They are good, just not made anymore (an older model). That's why they
are hard to come by. Performance wise, quite close to 9800Pro.
 
What are you guys talking about? I don't recall the 9800 adding any DX9
features that the 9700 didn't already have. It was just faster.
 
Philburg2 said:
What are you guys talking about? I don't recall the 9800 adding any DX9
features that the 9700 didn't already have. It was just faster.
Click to expand...

SmartShader 2.1 compared to 2.0:

http://www.ati.com/companyinfo/glossary/includes/list.html#smartshader20

Vertex Shader has increased instruction length from 1024 to 65280
instructions.

"Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 programmable vertex and pixel
shaders in hardware"

"New F-buffer technology supports fragment shader programs of unlimited
length"

There's a few tweaks in there, not sure if any were actually required
for DX9.

Ben
 
Spammy Sammy said:
Hi.Are these any good? I ask as it seems they were only made for a short
while and are not freely available now. Everywhere seems to have either
9600's or 9800's.
Click to expand...
I have a standard 9700 and my brother has a 9700 Pro
- both still good for Far Cry, HL2 and Doom 3. You can get a refurbished one
in the UL for £70 - should give you an idea of what to pay.
 
Philburg2 said:
What are you guys talking about? I don't recall the 9800 adding any DX9
features that the 9700 didn't already have. It was just faster.
Click to expand...

There was a specific issue, shader depth--nvidia was crowing about unlimited
shader depth and apparently adding it to the chip wasn't a huge hassle so
ATI brought out a new board very quickly that had that feature just to shut
nvidia up.
 
Spammy Sammy said:
Hi.Are these any good? I ask as it seems they were only made for a short
while and are not freely available now. Everywhere seems to have either
9600's or 9800's.
Click to expand...

The 9700 Pro is an excellent card, and performs within 5-10% of a 9800 Pro.
With modest overclocking it pretty much equals the 9800 Pro at stock clocks.
The DX9 hardware difference is trivial. I would defy anyone to notice a
visual difference running a DX9.0c game between the 9800 Pro and 9700 Pro.
 
I must agree

this is an excellent card

I am a heavy gammer and still no reason to upgrade from my ATI9700pro

havent come across a game that i cannot play with excellent detail

HL2 CS-S FarCry Doom3 FS9 NSPunderground etc....



ASUS A7n8x deluxe
2500 Barton running at 2.0gig
1 gig PC3200
120gig SATA
ATI 9700Pro128megs
 
Mark said:
I must agree
Click to expand...


I agree!
I have a system similar to yours and there is no need for me to upgrade
because of the performance.
Gigabyte GA-8I875Ultra
P4 Northwood 2.8 GHz
2x512 DDR400 Viking CL2.5
Radeon 9700Pro
Seagate SATA 80GB
 
Spammy Sammy said:
snip
Click to expand...

Useful replies.

From these, plus what I've been told privately the 9700 seems to be a worthy
card.

It was a toss-up between buying one of these or a 9800 but I've decided now
to go with the 9700 as it seems it's still an excellent card and it'll cost
a fair bit less.

Thanks to all.
 
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