ATi's Mobility Radeon 9000: DX8 for Notebooks

1. DirectX 8 For Notebooks

Only a short while ago, ATi unveiled Radeon 9700 , currently the most advanced 3D chip for desktop systems. This chip brings highly impressive features to your screen, already meeting the future standards of Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 9.

Things are all different in the notebook arena. Here, 3D graphics aren't as important and, at the same time, are much more difficult to implement. It still seems somewhat disappointing that since the inception of the first full-blood notebook 3D accelerator chip (NVIDIA's GeForce2 Go ) almost two years ago, the capabilities of notebook 3D graphics have remained at DirectX 7 level. The current 3D-solutions ATi Radeon 7500 as well as NVIDIA GeForce4 Go may have been launched quite a while after the release of DirectX 8, but none of the two come with programmable vertex or pixel shaders. Today, notebooks are finally able to catch up with their desktop nephews. The launch of ATi's Mobility Radeon 9000 opens the world of DirectX 8 features to the notebook user.

The Specifications Of Mobility Radeon 9000

Mobility Radeon 9000 (code name 'M9') is not a dedicated notebook design, but derived from the desktop product Radeon 9000, ATi's latest value offering. Therefore, the technical specifications of Radeon 9000 aren't any different for the desktop product either. The desktop version may not require the power saving features, but that does not mean Radeon 9000 and Mobility Radeon 9000 would be different chips. They are completely identical, while of course the notebook versions are specially picked chips that ensure reliable operation at low voltage and power consumption. In the same way that Radeon 9000 introduced new standards to the value desktop market, bringing programmable vertex and pixel shaders to the lower price range of graphics cards, Mobility Radeon 9000 finally makes notebooks capable of running DirectX 8 games with all their impressive 3D-effects.

Before I will simply list all of the relevant features of Mobility Radeon 9000, I suggest you have a look at the article about Radeon 9000 Pro , to learn all about the chip behind ATi's new notebook graphics solution.

List of Features:

36 million Transistors, 0.15µ-process Core Clock 240 - 250 MHz, Memory Clock 400-440 MHz (both clocks depend on implementation) Theoretical Fill Rate 960 - 1000 Mpixel/s Memory Bandwidth 6400 - 7040 MB/s AGP 8x support Two DirectX 8.1 compliant programmable vertex shaders DirectX 8.1 compliant programmable pixel shaders Four pixel rendering pipelines One texturing unit per pixel pipeline Hyper-Z II Memory Bandwidth Optimization Smoothvision = Super Sampling FSAA Powerplay - ATi's power management (not implemented in first shipping notebooks!) Integrated MPEG2 (DVD) decoding units, like iDCT, motion compensation, hardware sub-picture decoder, adaptive de-interlacing 400 MHz RAMDAC, 165 MHz TMDS transmitter, integrated video-out Multi-display support with ATi Hydravision, allowing up to three displays at the same time (notebook panel, CRT, television)

The Test System

We received our Mobility Radeon 9000 sample in the form of a notebook. Unfortunately, we are not supposed to disclose the brand of the notebook, but we can tell you that it was equipped with a 2 GHz Pentium 4, i845M chipset, 512 MB of DDR-SDRAM and a 1600x1200 TFT screen. We used driver revision 7.75 for the tests, which do NOT include ATi's 'Powerplay' power management. ATi told us that the first shipping notebooks with Mobility Radeon 9000 will not have Powerplay enabled, because it will take some more time until the Powerplay software for the new chip has been fully developed and then validated by the OEMs.

The Mobility Radeon 9000 within the notebook was clocked at 240 MHz, and the memory clock was 420 MHz. Thus the theoretical fill rate was 960 Mpixel/s and the memory bandwidth was 6720 MB/s. The core and memory clock speeds found in the notebooks that will use Mobility Radeon 9000 might vary from those settings, because the OEM will set them according to power requirements and thermal envelope of the notebook design.

The Contestants

We were lucky in that we could run all the other chips on virtually the same kind of notebook platform as well. Mobility Radeon 9000 was up against three opponents.

ATi Mobility Radeon 9000

ATi is using only 4.5 ns memory, which is why the memory clock is a mere 420 MHz.

ATi Mobility Radeon 7500, the predecessor

NVIDIA GeForce4 Go440, the current competitor

NVIDIA's GeForce4 Go440 uses 3.6 ns memory, which is clocked at 440 MHz.

NVIDIA GeForce4 Go460, the new competitor with increased core and memory clocks

The upcoming GeForce4 Go460 comes with 2ns memory, allowing a whopping memory clock of 580 MHz.

We ran Mobility Radeon 7500 at a core clock of 280 MHz and a memory clock of 400 MHz. GeForce4 Go440 was operated at a core clock of 220 MHz and a memory clock of 440 MHz. Finally, the other new kid on the block, internally dubbed 'NV17M Pro,' is clocked at 275 MHz for its core, and at a whopping 580 MHz for its memory.