ATI Mobility Radeon 9800: Notebooks Get Next Generation Graphics
by Derek Wilson on August 19, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
We have been very satisfied with our MR9800 experience. For quite a while, we have called for high performance graphics options to make their way into the mobile market for those who are willing to trade battery life and heat for added performance. Not everyone who wants mobility also needs long battery life. Notebooks are much more portable than SFF computers, and we finally have a notebook option that is a viable solution for the LAN party crowd.Additionally, pushing higher performance options requires companies to really think hard about power management. Necessity is the mother of invention, and if the market requires high performance mobile computing, companies will have to build a better mouse trap (or at least a lower power GPU) to grab design wins.
And performance isn't the only factor. The fact that we are seeing the level of compatibility and feature set of the desktop move into the mobile space faster than we've even seen new mid-range and budget parts make it into the market from everyone is very impressive.
We would definitely like to see this, or similar parts, make its way into more notebooks.
The only real complaint that we can levy against ATI is that their notebook drivers are still lagging the desktop. Now that we've seen the hardware catch up, we'd like to see the software follow suit. ATI's new driver every month scheme might not work well for the notebook market (and is arguably not the best thing in general), but pushing notebook vendors to issue quarterly releases that match ATI's desktop counterparts would be a welcome addition to the already incredible setup that ATI is gathering together.
To be fair, we haven't yet seen what NVIDIA is bringing to market on the mobile side. From what we are hearing, they are planning on pushing a lot of power out to the DTR market as well, which should make for very exciting competition. Right now, we'll have to leave the question hanging in the air, much as we left it after NVIDIA launched the 6800 Ultra. Will the competition be able to close the performance/feature set gap? Only time will tell.
Now that all our mobile dreams are coming true, we will have to shift our focus back to begging companies to start offering competitive, performance-oriented, integrated desktop graphics solutions.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
31 Comments
View All Comments
nserra - Monday, August 23, 2004 - link
Thanks for the reply and it's really impressive that a 256bit memory interface is going into the mobile market so soon.I also don’t understand the problem about the driver? Is it about the time taken to release a new one (validation)? What i do is to force the last catalyst to install, it have worked just fine with me.
ATIMobileGuy - Friday, August 20, 2004 - link
#28 nserraKeep in mind the development cycle for mobile designs is longer than desktop development - when the design was started there were still questions on GDDR3 power and availability at the time, so we felt DDR was the ideal solution for the initial mobile introduction of this type of product. Plus, running at 300MHz and using the full 256-bit memory interface we felt the memory bandwidth was pretty good for a mobile design.
This is not to say GDDR3 is not going to show up in Mobile soon - as I said in post #26, there are a lot of surprises coming your way in the future. ;-)
nserra - Friday, August 20, 2004 - link
To DerekWilson and/or ATIMobileGuy:On you nvidia Geforce5800 review about ati Anisotropic Filtering: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=1779...
“Since there is virtually no difference between ATI's Performance and Quality modes, …..”
Does this still hold true in today’s games?
Since I could get some nice performance boost according to these charts
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=1779...
nserra - Friday, August 20, 2004 - link
To ATIMobileGuy:-If this is for the mobile market, why not use the new GDDR3 memory, since it would lower the power consuming and heat and deliver higher speed.
-Isn’t these chip a "little" waste of time if taken into desktop, since you guys already have a very similar chip but at .15, or we will only will see it on notebooks for the time.
DerekWilson - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
#22 suryadWe actually had the XPS in early July IIRC. We used ATI's latest drivers at that point. I'm not sure what driver the current Dell release is based on, but maybe Darren (ATIMobileGuy) can help us out there ;-)
ATIMobileGuy - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Comment 5 [I](Posted by Anemone)[/I]Anemone, thanks for the comments. Without saying too much, I can tell you that this was really our first attempt at a new class of product, and once we move into PCI Express we'll have a few more surprises for you that should make you happy!
ATIMobileGuy - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Re: Comment 20 (the esteemed Mr. Baumann)This is true Dave - unlike the desktop side, every Mobile driver is customized for each notebook for things like power management, hot keys, panel support - all kinds of things. If ATI were to provide "generic" drivers the user would run the risk of losing a lot of features or would experience potential instability.
The OEM has to do a lot of qualification to test all these unique aspects of their driver before feeling comfortable releasing it. Dell has been very good in understanding the need for fresh drivers, expecially for this segment, so I think it won't be too long before you see a new driver release for this system from them.
ATIMobileGuy - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Hi Everyone - I'm Darren from ATI Mobile group. Just finished reading the review, and wanted to read the comments and see if there was anything I could answer from the comments that were posted; will be checking in sporadically and will give some responses to some of the things that have already been posted if possible.jediknight - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Doom 3 benchmarks, please!!suryad - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
I have a similar specced Dell XPS and I was initially getting a 5440 with 3dmark but then I used Dells release of the 4.8 Catalyst drivers and that alone pushed me to a 6600 on 3dmark and over 43.1k in Aquamark3 all stock settings. Now I am not saying that the benchmark is the tell all in this situation but where these benches performed using the latest driverset? I am curious since I have yet to install any new games on it and wanted to know if I would get a performance boost sorta similar to what I got in 3dmark.