3. What The "NEW" MR 9700 Offers, Continued

As far as 3D features are concerned, there are no differences between the MR9700 and its predecessor. The design still uses four pixel-pipelines and two vertex shader units. The top model comes with 128 MB of video memory and a 128Bit memory interface. Unlike the MR9600 family, this line will not feature a PRO version with an even higher core frequency like the MR 9600 PRO.

Of course, sharp and perhaps jealous tongues within the industry claim that the MR9700 is nothing more than an optimized Mobility Radeon 9600 running at a higher clockspeed.

However, ATi also claims to have improved the Z-compression, which is now called Hyper-Z III+ and is supposed to allow for compression ratios of up to 24:1. It is doubtful whether the Z-compression was really improved over that of the MR9600 PRO, which was the previous flagship mobile processor.

After all, ATi had already claimed a maximum compression ratio of 24:1 for that model upon its presentation (see figure), albeit only when using antialiasing. When this compression ratio for the MR9700 and the R9600 XT is actually achieved remains unclear.