Specifications & Features
Before we get to the games, let's take a quick look to accustom you with the technical specification of the Radeon 9800 Atlantis.
The first thing that I usually check on any new graphics card is the memory. What brand it is and, more importantly, how fast it is rated for. Sapphire opted to use Samsung DDR modules rated at a relatively slow 3.3ns which equates to a theoretical maximum speed of only 300MHz. The Sapphire 9800 Atlantis ships at the 9800 standard stock speed of 290Mhz of course, but using this relatively slow ram doesn't leave you with as much headroom for overclocking as, say, 3.0ns ram modules would give you which some other manufactures use. 3.0ns is rated for a theoretical maximum speed of 333Mhz, which would bring you very close to 9800 Pro speed memory. However, that's all theory, and it's called overclocking for a reason and a lot of people have had good results overclocking Samsungs BGA ram. i'll take a close look at overclocking later on.
The core of the 9800 Atlantis features the same 8x1 design and is built using the same .15µ design as the 9800 Pro, but runs considerably slower at only 325Mhz compared to 380MHz on the 9800 Pro.
| |
Radeon 9800 |
Radeon 9800 Pro |
Radeon 9700 Pro |
| Manufacturing Process |
.15µ |
.15µ |
.15µ |
Transistor Count
(millions) |
~110 |
~110 |
~110 |
| Core Speed |
325MHz |
380MHz |
325MHz |
| Memory Speed |
290MHz
DDR |
340MHz
DDR |
310MHz
DDR |
| Memory Interface |
256bit |
256bit |
256bit |
| Max Memory |
256MB |
256MB |
256MB |
| Rendering Pipelines |
8 |
8 |
8 |
| TMUs per Pipe |
1 |
1 |
1 |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth |
18.5 GB/s |
21.8 GB/s |
19.8 GB/s |
Pixel Fillrate
(million pixels/sec) |
2,600 |
3,040 |
2,600 |
Texel Fillrate
(million texels/sec) |
2,600 |
3,040 |
2,600 |
| DX9 Pixel-Shader version |
2.0 |
2.0 |
2.0 |
Vertex-Shaders
(version) |
4 (2.0) |
4 (2.0) |
4 (2.0) |
9800 Features
- 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
