ATI’s RADEON 9700 VPU was proud to be the first fully DirectX 9 compliant graphics core and it went on to be ‘the’ gaming card to own for more than half a year. With the heavily hyped NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra ending up as a lackluster product, the RADEON 9700 effortlessly reigned as the best available and affordable (in contrast to the FX 5800 Ultra) high-end gaming card. While NVIDIA was nearing the period of launch of their GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, ATI revised the RADEON 9700’s R300 core and came out with the R350 core to better compete with NVIDIA’s new product.
Although numerically, it seems as if great improvements have been made over its predecessor, the R350 is mostly an update judging by the enhancements. ATI is also engaged in the model number game similar to NVIDIA and the R350 core is now named as the RADEON 9800 VPU. However, there is a problem with ATI’s model numbering scheme since the entire 9xxx series is dotted with the highest-end all the way down to the lowest end graphics cards. Due to this reason, the individual models in the entire series are not quite comparable or consistent in their graphics engine and supported features. If you were to peek in to the NVIDIA’s clearly defined series of GeForce4 MX, GeForce4 Ti and GeForce FX, the products within them are much better represented in their capabilities than if you were to look at the entire 9xxx series from ATI. From the amount of queries and uncertainties expressed by just looking at the discussions from our community, ATI has definitely done a great job in confusing users. Certainly more effort is needed to improve their product numbering/naming schemes with their next generation of products (certainly not now, as it would only add to the confusion further).
Read the full review at HardwareZone.com
Jun 5, 2003, 04:48 PM
