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.
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ianwhthse - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
You know, I think I read it wrong. 256-bit bus width, but no mention of the memory.I think I'm just confusing myself now, so I'll leave it to the experts to tell me off.
ianwhthse - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
7 & 8: Dell is currently selling the X800 SE in their Dimension 8400 series (And possibly elsewhere).Looks like the X800 SE is a system-vendor only thing. But it does supposedly have a 256-bit memory.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/2004070...
Xbit labs talks about it. Futuremark (Yeah, yeah, 3dMark sucks. Blah, blah) doesn't currently even have the option to view X800 SEs on their ORB so I would assume they're not out in significant numbers yet.
jcwagers - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Is it just me or does it seem like the UT2k4 benchies are slighly low? I know that it is a tweaked and slightly more demanding version than UT2k3 but surely not by that much. The 3400+ with Radeon 9800XT scores a 51.6fps at 1280x1204? A similar config in earlier reviews ran UT2k3 at 98fps on a 9800 Pro. I know that 1280x1024 is more stressful than 1024x768 and that UT2k4 is more demanding...but should there be THAT much performance loss? I know it was a notebook review but it just seems strange to not see higher fps on the game. Again....maybe it's just me........jc
Johnmcl7 - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
It is .13 low-kAs far as I'm aware, ATi did have plans to release this card as the X800SE, but with 128-bit memory rather than 256, but I've not seen any sign of it.
John
nserra - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Why don’t they use GDDR3? It would lower the power consuming, that's important for mobile. Maybe GDDR3 memory banks are bigger?Is this chip .13 lowk, right?
I will wait for the desktop version of this chip. If its 9800 nr on mobile, I bet will do 500Mhz on desktop.
And if it's 256bit it will out do nvidia 6600 since this card is 128bit only.
What will ati call it? X700?
Johnmcl7 - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Dell do not only sell 4,200rpm hard drives in their notebooks, they sell 7,200rpm 60GB hard drives and 5,400 rpm 80GB hard drives as options.Very impressive results from a notebook though, performed better than I expected.
John
Anemone - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
Well, I might be a bit too demanding from a poor notebook but, imo, one more generation and probably they will have finally gotten notebook gaming to an ok level. 9800 is pretty good, but I'd prefer to see closer to X800 pro #'s and pci-express changeable interfaces before taking the leap into notebooks.$.02
DerekWilson - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
We've updated the article with clock speeds: core 350, mem 300.Most game test are not affected by harddrive speed (except for loading time between levels). None of our tests are significantly affected by harddrive speed (especially with all the system and video ram in the box).
For more info on our farcry tests, see here: http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2102 ... we used the airstrip_mp demo as we have been doing since we started testing farcry. We also always test with sound disabled.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
unuselessj - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
I did some looking into the Dell Inspiron XPS specs. Dell's "help me choose" specs say that it does have 256mb ram and a 256-bit bus. On NotebookForums, someone who had tested the XPS with the MR9800 said it comes set to 350mhz core and 300mhz ram.I also noticed that in the specs for the laptop used, the harddrive was an 80gb. Dell only sells 4200rpm drives. Although I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have much of a difference, I'm curious as to what the benchmark results would be if the laptop had a 60gb 7200rpm drive that would be more similar to the desktop's harddrive speed and buffer.
l3ored - Thursday, August 19, 2004 - link
what far cry benchmark is that? i have an athlon 64 3000, 9800 pro, and a gig of memory, and theres no way i would score 40fps average at those settings.