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Final Words
The Radeon 9700 Pro made a mockery out of the benchmarks we've thrown at it today. Whether or not you need it will depend on a lot of things. I've made it very clear in our bottlenecking article that with great video card power, you'd better have the CPU to back it up. I'm going to flat out say that unless you have an Athlon XP, or Intel Northwood at the minimum, you're not going to get your moneys worth. The Radeon 9700 is extremely scalable, and even with our overclocked P4, I doubt we'd even got close to maxing it out.
As with every new technology, there are going to be some growing pains. There have been reported issues with AGP8x motherboards, and I've witnessed this first hand with an Asus board. A BIOS update resolved the issue, but in rare cases, it may not. Power supplies are making its way back into the press, as the Radeon does have certain power requirements. That being said, don't think that a big 400W PSU is going to immediately solve your problems. Quality is the story of the day, and make sure you stick to a name brand that enthusiasts trust. Antec, PC Power and Cooling, and Enermax are a few that come to mind.
Driver issues seem to be a problem of the past. During testing, both benchmarking and gameplay, we did not encounter any problems with crashes or dropped textures. Outside of the games we used for our real world tests, Battlefield 1942, Warcraft 3, and Hitman 2 all worked fine without any problems. If you are having issues, ATi has been much more responsive with driver updates and patches than they have been in the past, and I suggest checking out their support pages.
As for hardware features, the dual outputs will appeal to desktop publishers. It's not a triple output like the Parhelia, but 2D image quality at 1600x1200 was excellent nevertheless. I'd be hard pressed to tell you if it is a lot better than the nVidia cards, but I certainly don't have any complaints. As for 3D gaming, default driver settings made for a slightly darker picture than the Ti4600, though the images seemed richer and less washed out.
Starting at around 300$ for 3rd party Radeon 9700s, that is going to be a lot of coin to drop on a video card. If you already have a Ti4600 based card, I don't really think an upgrade to the 9700 is going to be that important for you unless you're hurting for Anti-Aliasing. Anyone else with something slower should consider this card. Heck, if money is no object, and framerates are, the 9700 will definitely make you one happy camper.
Just a few months ago, the nVidia Ti4600 was untouchable. How things have changed with the Radeon 9700. Will the speed crown pass back to nVidia in the future? Already, the rumored specs of the NV30 look pretty darn good, and it may well be the case that nVidia will be back on top, but I wouldn't count on this card to come out for quite some time. Then again, ATi has already demonstrated the R300 with DDR-II, and perhaps we'll see something updated in the 9700 in the near future. This is all just speculation, but let's look at the facts. The Radeon 9700 Pro is no doubt, the fastest video card on the market that you can buy... today. JC was showing off Doom 3 with a Radeon 9700, which if anything, shows the power of the Radeon 9700 for the games of the future. There will always be something faster in the future, but if you think and shop that way, you'll be missing out on a lot of stuff. No doubt, this is the most interesting piece of technology we've looked at in some time. You may have "buyer-regret" (the feeling you get when wondering if you should be spending this much money) when you give the cashier the credit card, but as soon as you install the Radeon 9700, you'll forget all that.
Pros: Fastest gaming card, period. Superb image quality, dual monitor ready.
Cons: Expensive, but you get what you pay for.
Bottom Line: Fact is, image quality being equal, the 9700 is the fastest card you can buy. Knowing that, the 9700 can run at higher IQ (AA and AF) settings than the competition, and still have plenty of speed to burn.
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