12. Bottom Line

ATi is of course proud to be the first 3D chipmaker that can offer a notebook graphics solution that supports DirectX 8. NVIDIA lost this race just as much as it lost the race against Radeon 9700 Pro in the desktop arena. However, what does the owner of a future notebook with ATi's new Mobility Radeon 9000 really get? As long as the majority of games are running just fine on DirectX 7 hardware, the advantage of Mobility Radeon 9000 is minimal. ATi should have made sure to give its new mobile chip more memory bandwidth to bring up real-world fill rate, because this is still the number one requirement of 3D games running on notebooks. The benchmark results speak a clear language. Mobility Radeon 9000 is far from an impressive 3D performer.

It is true that NVIDIA's yet unreleased GeForce4 Go460 was able to spoil the show, as it can deliver frame rates that are either extremely close to, or sometimes even slightly better than those of Mobility Radeon 9000. We will see which of the two chips will be available first.

If you compare the chips on a power consumption level however, Mobility Radeon 9000 is the best offering out there right now. This will most likely ensure that the new mobile ATi chip will earn the majority of design wins in the near future. However, the 3D benchmark scores of Mobility Radeon 9000 are disappointing, there is no denying that.

NVIDIA will try its best to catch up soon. It won't take long for NV18M's release, something like GeForce4 Go460 with AGP 8x support. Only a short while later, and probably before the end of this year, there will be NV28M, a mobile derivative of GeForce4 Ti 4200, which will probably beat Mobility Radeon 9000 in 3D performance, but lag behind it in terms of power consumption. What NVIDIA is really waiting for is the NV3x family of chips. In the Spring of next year we will see a notebook chip in 0.13 micron process with DirectX 9 support. Until then, NVIDIA will have a hard time to compete with ATi in the notebook arena.

For now, Mobility Radeon 9000 is the best 3D solution for notebooks, but its lead in terms of 3D performance is, unfortunately, disappointingly small.