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- 0.15 micron manufacturing technology;
- 110 million transistors;
- FCPGA package;
- 325MHz chip frequency (in the ATI RADEON 9700 PRO modification);
- 256-bit DDR SDRAM memory bus;
- Maximum 256MB graphics memory;
- 620MHz (310MHz DDR) memory frequency in ATI RADEON 9700 PRO;
- AGP 2x (3.3v), 4x (1.5v), 8x (0.8v) and Universal AGP 3.0 (2x/4x/8x) support;
- Compliant with PC2002 specifications.

- Eight pixel pipelines complying with the DirectX9 pixel shaders ver.2.0 specs (ATI SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology);
- One texture sampling unit per pixel processor;
- Bi-linear, tri-linear, anisotropic and tri-linear + anisotropic texture filtering support;
- Four vertex pipelines complying with the DirectX9 vertex shaders ver.2.0 specs (ATI SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology);
- Full-screen anti-aliasing with 2x, 4x and 6x multisampling (ATI SMOOTHVISION 2.0 technology);
- Polygon tessellation, continuous and adaptive tessellation, N-patches and displacement mapping support (ATI TRUFORM 2.0 technology);
- The algorithms of effective utilization of the available memory bandwidth (ATI HyperZ III).

- Video processing with the help of pixel shaders units (ATI VIDEOSHADER technology);
- MPEG4/DivX compression artifacts filtering (ATI FULLSTREAM technology);
- DVD hardware decoding, adaptive de-interlacing, motion compensation;
- Image output in the YPrPb component format;
- Two CRT controllers;
- Two integrated 400MHz RAMDACs;
- An integrated 165MHz TMDS transceiver.

The results of our tests definitely state that ATI RADEON 9700 PRO is the fastest gaming graphics chip available today.

One more detail. The performance of the today's leader, ATI RADEON 9700 PRO, and its closest rival, NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, is so high that in most cases it is rather the CPU and not the graphics card that appears the bottleneck of the system. It means that if you don't have the top-end CPU (e.g. Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz, as in our testbed), you're running the chance of not ever seeing any difference between the two graphics cards.

New anti-aliasing and "fast" anisotropic filtering methods leave no chance to the rivals of the new ATI's solution. The superiority in performance can be measured not in percents, but in "times" now :).

All this suggests the following advice: the happy possessors of an ATI RADEON 9700 PRO based card should set the maximum anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering levels. In most today's games you won't even notice any performance loss.

As for image quality improvements provided by the new anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering algorithms, we have every right to state that the improvements are here and you'll see them, for sure.