ATI All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro Preview

ATI has put on quite an impressive show as of late. The company, which had been one upped by NVIDIA in years past, has now found itself in an interesting position. Thanks to a series of very impressive product launches, ATI chips have become the chip of choice for a wide segment of the computer graphics market.

The success began two months ago with the highly anticipated Radeon 9700 Pro, a high-end 3D graphics card that was able to dethrone the previous performance king, the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600, by a sizable amount. ATI paired the high-end Radeon 9700 Pro launch with the consumer level Radeon 9000 Pro. The Radeon 9000 Pro took aim at the NVIDIA GeForce4 MX series cards and hit the them where it hurts by offering higher performance at a competitive price.

Next on ATI's to-do list was an update to their workstation class Fire GL line. This produced the Fire GL X1, a card that has been met with much enthusiasm in the workstation market thanks to its full DirectX 9 and future OpenGL support.

The last ATI division to receive new hardware was the mobile division. At the beginning of this month we covered the new Mobility Radeon chip, the Mobility Radeon 9000. Able to bring full DirectX 8.1 pixel and vertex shader support to notebooks, the Mobility Radeon 9000 delivered yet another blow to the competition.

It is clear that ATI has had a killer few months. The company released very compelling products throughout their entire PC gaming divisions. The high-end 3D, value 3D, workstation, and mobile division each received powerful new hardware aimed at making ATI the performance king. Yet, despite all these new products, there was one division of ATI yet to have received new hardware: the multimedia division. Until now the highest end All-in-Wonder product was based on the last generation Radeon 8500 GPU. That changes today.

Truth be told, even if ATI did not update their All-in-Wonder video card to include new hardware, we would have been pleased with the performance of the company. The last All-in-Wonder product, the All-in-Wonder 8500DV, won the AnandTech Editor's Choice Gold award five months ago and has yet to have received an answer from competing companies. So why did ATI one-up themselves and release a product essentially two multimedia generations beyond what is out there currently? Because they could.

Today ATI announces the All-in-Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro. Although we do not have hardware yet we were recently given the opportunity to spend some time with ATI in order to give you an idea of what exactly the new All-in-Wonder brings to the table. It is much more than just a Radeon 9700 Pro with a tuner slapped on. Much, much more.