The Radeon 9800 Pro is without a doubt the dominant force in the high-end graphics card market. It has the performance – without image quality cheats – to run the latest Direct X 9.0 titles without having to reduce settings to an unacceptable level.
Unlike previous generations of product, when ATi used to only make their own cards, there are a variety of 9800 Pro’s available from various manufacturers, most of which follow the reference design to a tee. Today we are lucky enough to have a roundup of six cards. We won’t be looking in detail at the technology behind the cards for the simple reason that many websites, including ourselves, have done so already.
The main improvements to the 9800 core vs. the 9700 Pro are involved in optimising Hyper-Z III, ATi's bandwidth reduction technology. This minimises the amount of resources wasted on drawing objects either off screen or out of the point of view of the gamer. There have also been improvements to the colour compression algorithms, and other Z-optimisations which come into play when enabling AA. This means that the 9800 pro, clock for clock, will be up to 30% quicker than its predecessor when image quality is enabled. The stock speed of the 9800 Pro core is 380MHz, some 17% higher than the 9700 pro, with the memory being clocked 10% higher at 340MHz as mentioned before. The 256MB version of the card also has its core clocked at 380MHz, but the memory is 10 MHz faster at 350MHz (700MHz DDR) and features DDR-II technology.
The cards we are looking at today are the Hercules 9800 Pro, the Crucial 9800 Pro, the Sapphire 9800 Pro with 256MB DDR, the HIS 9800 “IceQ” 9800 Pro, the ATi reference 9800 Pro with 256MB DDR and finally the All in wonder 9800 Pro, again from HIS. The key to this shootout will be differentiation, and of course price.
