For some time now, the once-competitive graphics card industry has been reduced to a one-horse race. The field has been so completely dominated by nVidia, that in an upcoming workstation review, every high-end system used an nVidia graphics card. With the release of ATI Technology's newest graphics card, a new course has been set—and the pacesetter is the $399 list ATI Radeon 9700 Pro.

ATI doubles up on everything in its leap from the older Radeon 8500 series to the new Radeon 9700 Pro—the card comes with a 256-bit DDR memory interface, an eight-pixel pipeline, and four parallel vertex shaders. Toss in a core engine speed of 325 MHz and the ability to process one vertex and one triangle within a single clock cycle, and you get a raw fill rate of 325 million triangles per second, nearly three times as much as the nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600. The 620-MHz memory clock translates to a peak memory bandwidth of 20.8 GB per second, double that of the Ti 4600.

Feature capabilities are similarly enhanced: ATI's Smoothvision 2.0 combines with the 9700 Pro's raw power to provide 4X full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering without undue impact on raw frame-rates. ATI Videoshader technology puts the card's pixel shaders to work on compressed video streams, improving overall video quality.

We installed the Radeon 9700 Pro in a 2.4-GHz Dell Dimension 8200 equipped with 512MB of RAM, Windows XP, and DirectX 8.1 and compared its performance to an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4600. Installation was a breeze, but the 9700 Pro's processing prowess comes at a price: the card draws so much power that it requires an additional hookup to the computer's power supply via a four-pin pass-through connector. As you might expect, the card runs a bit hot despite its VPU cooling fan. A small metal plate on the back of the card helps it dissipate excess heat.

The Radeon 9700 Pro performed remarkably well on the MadOnion 3DMark2001—better than the nVidia Ti 4600 at every turn. And the 9700 Pro really begins to strut its stuff as conditions become more extreme. At a resolution of 1,600-by-1,200-by-32-bit color, with bi-directional (4X) anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on, the 9700 performed nearly three times as fast as the Ti 4600, overall. Anti-aliasing is clearly the board's strong point. With 2X FSAA turned on, the 9700 Pro outperformed a GeForce4 running with FSAA disabled. Within the individual tests that comprise the 3DMark2001, the Radeon 9700 Pro won every match-up, showing off its advanced pixel and vertex shaders, powering through single- and multi-textured fill-rate tests, and racing through scenes that had complex lighting and high polygon counts.

Perhaps more important for ATI and its customers, the Radeon 9700 Pro seems to have avoided the driver instability problems that plagued ATI's Radeon 8500. Image quality was excellent throughout our testing, and the card swept through our Business Winstone 2002 and Content Creation Winstone 2002 benchmark programs without a hitch.

With no new competition in sight for several months, the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro stands to enjoy a relatively long run at the top of the graphics card heap, and ATI's Silicon Valley-based team of developers deserves kudos for this strong product launch. The graphics card industry is notorious for rapid leapfrogs in technology, but with built-in support for 8X AGP and DirectX 9, the Radeon 9700 Pro should provide gamers and content creators with reliable performance for some time to come.

For a detailed look at the Radeon 9700 Pro's architecture, see Extreme Tech's "ATI's Radeon 9700 Takes Performance Lead" story.