The ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is the fastest 3-D card around and the clear winner if you crave 3-D power. The company has been designing 3-D graphics acceleration into its chips for years, but for the first time in a good while ATI is the performance leader, a spot nVidia owned until recently. And unlike previous generations, the Radeon 9700 Pro has held this lead for over four months, as of November. Previously, ATI has measured its time as the top dog in weeks, until nVidia shipped its next version and regained the performance crown. The brute-force Radeon 9700 Pro has eight pixel pipelines, each equipped with a single texturing unit. With a core clock speed of 325 MHz, it cranks out a pixel fill rate of 2.6 gigapixels per second—that's roughly 2.6 billion pixels per second.

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All of that horsepower would be useless without the Radeon 9700 Pro's 256-bit-wide memory data path and four-way interleaved memory controller. With a memory clock speed of 620 MHz, the graphics card has a peak memory bandwidth of 19.8 GBps, roughly twice that of the Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD MyVIVO.

The card can be installed easily enough, although it requires extra power via a direct connection to your computer's power supply. Because of the Radeon 9700 Pro's size and high clock speed, it requires more power than the AGP slot alone can provide. The system will boot without this direct connection between the card and the power supply, but the 3-D chip will run at a significantly reduced speed. The card is skimpy in the bundled-software department, although it does come with ATI's Multimedia Center, which includes ATI's own DVD player.

Until now, graphics cards had to trade off between frame rate and image quality, with frame rate almost always prevailing. But the Radeon 9700 Pro doesn't compromise on either. Download Free Wham Greatest Hits Rar. It can run at 1,600-by-1,200 with full-scene anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, an advanced, potentially performance-killing filtering technique that improves texture qualities on sloped surfaces.

And even with all of these features hammering on the card, the Radeon 9700 Pro keeps most games moving along quite nicely. On the 3-D game tests we ran, the Radeon 9700 Pro was not always the winner.

But the performance race isn't just a sprint, it's also a marathon. When you begin piling extra rendering work onto these GPUs, the Radeon 9700 Pro pulls ahead. At a resolution of 1,600-by-1,200 with 4X full-scene anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled, the Radeon 9700 Pro sustained playable frame rates while the WinFast Ultra often couldn't. Take the Comanche 4 demo (not included in the table), for example: At 1,600-by-1,200 without anti-aliasing, the Radeon 9700 Pro ran at 33 fps—tied with the WinFast Ultra. But adding anti-aliasing reduced the WinFast Ultra's performance by more than 50 percent, to 16 fps. The Radeon 9700 Pro took a smaller hit, slowing only to 27 fps. NVidia is likely to make waves with its upcoming NV30 GPU, but for now the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is the winner.

Dave came to have his insatiable tech jones by way of music—and because his parents wouldn't let him run away to join the circus. After a brief and ill-fated career in professional wrestling, Dave now covers audio, HDTV, and 3D graphics technologies at ExtremeTech. Dave came to ExtremeTech as its first hire from Computer Gaming World, where he was Technical Director and Lead (okay, the only) Saxophonist for five years.