ATI's Mobility Radeon 9700 - What's in a name?
by Andrew Ku on February 3, 2004 12:50 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
NHL 2004
We haven't had a game title that touches on the sports genre. NHL 2004 seemed to be the easiest title of the titles to duplicate for benchmarking, but we nevertheless came up with limitations. A previous version of NHL could save replays, but NHL 2004 cannot, which leaves us with the question on how to duplicate the scenario under different conditions. We can't actually save a replay on our own, but the retail version of NHL 2004 has a built-in demo mode that starts when you are inactive for a while on the main menu of the game. The demo mode is game play that is rendered through the game engine; the camera angles of the demo replay can be achieved if you play the game on your own.Since the replay is in the game engine and the frame rates were high enough, we turned on AA and AF. Our scores were fairly high even with AA and AF, so we would say that you could run either GPU at up to 1600x1200 without either enabled.
Our scores put the Mobility Radeon 9700 at a 27% lead over the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro. So there isn't too much unexpected here.
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Platter - Saturday, February 14, 2004 - link
Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that the recent official announcement from IBM regarding the 970FX has something to do with ATI's 'Big One™'?PowerBook G5, anyone?
Andrew Ku - Monday, February 9, 2004 - link
Ok, so to answer some of the inquires posed to me - if you currently own a Mobility Radeon 9600 (one of the three) based notebook, you are more or less set to go. The Mobility Radeon 9700 in the majority of cases behaves like an OC'ed version of its predecessor. However, the M10 is still a very hardy chip seems like it is going to have a long life cycle.As for waiting time, it looks like the bulk of the design wins won't start to be announced until the end of Feb. So go with a M10 based notebook if you plan to buy within the next few months or if you are just looking for the "traditional notebook." It's going to take some time before mainstream sees M11 in their mobile systems. And when it does, M11 will be in DTR notebooks for the most part.
Serp86 - Thursday, February 5, 2004 - link
i think that the performance difference is quite enoght to justify calling it a 9700.yomer - Thursday, February 5, 2004 - link
So Andrew, Dell is supposed to be one of the bunch in adopting the M9700. Might Dell be called BIG? I wanted to buy an IBM t41p with a mobility firegl T2(based on the 9600) with 128MB. Should I wait and buy a notebook with the new M9700? Is it worth it? How much should we wait in oder to be able to buy one of thoes notebooks here in the US?TrogdorJW - Wednesday, February 4, 2004 - link
#9, it's all marketing. There will be enough people out there that don't know hardware who will just assume the 9700M is the same as the desktop 9700. Too bad for them. The important thing is that the M11 *is* quite a bit faster than the R9600 Mobility Pro, right? Or maybe they should have called the part the Mobility Radeon 9800 SE? ;)CaptainSpectacular - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link
ok ATI, what's with the naming scheme. this is absolutely awful! This part has nothing to do with the desktop 9700. I understand the dilema as presented, but what's wrong with 9650? or some other similar variation? the name 9700 is flat out misleading, regardless of how you justify it. This is almost as bad as nvidia calling the NV17 a GeForce4 series card (ok, not nearly that bad, but same idea...)Slappi - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link
Well if it is BIG I would think the biggest notebook maker is Toshiba and they are all Nvidia now so....... that would be huge.Do I get a cookie?
Andrew Ku - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link
#6 - Sorry, no hints. You can count all the big guys on a single hand, and so there isn't much point in the old'e guess and check.yomer - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link
Andrew please! Tell me that the big name is not IBM!!Andrew Ku - Tuesday, February 3, 2004 - link
#2 - From our talks with the OEMs and ODMs, we understand that the pricing between the two chips is basically pocket change for prospective notebooks owners.