Digital Trends

ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro July 29th, 2003 | by Douglas Hall

The hardware store

Putting it all together is ATI's latest VPU (Video Processing Unit) and Theater 200 chipset which is a single chip analog video and stereo audio processor responsible for the image and capture quality of watching or editing film and TV along with digital decoding for Dolby surround features directly from the video card itself. The sound was crisp and clear on our Technics system and when boosted to 500 watts really shook the candy machine during DVD playback of Jurassic park.

Output setup is a breeze in the display properties add on tabs.

Today's video standard of 128 MB of DDR memory are certainly maintained on this card and coupled with a 256 bit memory interface and 8-pixel pipeline. The All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro surely smoked our benchmarking software in the frame rate arena. Being fully AGP3.0 (8x) and DirectX 9 compliant and instigating the latest SMARTSHADER 2.1, ATI's full scene anti-aliasing technology provides the smooth texturing and much sought after eye candy we've been waiting for since the video revolution began

With the VPU running at 380 MHz and dual RAMDAC at 340 MHz, the All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro absolutely screams. We've seen faster cards but none can keep up to this one for over all performance and flexibility. It was surprising to see such a small heat sink and fan assembly on the All-In-Wonder Radeon 9800 Pro as other graphics card makers seem to use the HSF combo as a trademark in design and size.

What's the score

Benchmarking was not the boring chore it is with some other graphics cards. Quake 3 arena has traditionally been one of the toughest benchmarks on videos cards since its release, but we realized frame rates to 312 FPS on our Sony big screen, and pictures from a camera were almost impossible. Below you can see the overlapping of the text and textures of the flooring as it flew by.

Quake 3 benchmark on the bigscreen

These frame rates were unheard of just a few years ago and the technology is moving forward every day. Soon Quake3 Arena will be a low-end benchmark and the future will hold a whole new set of standards. GunMetal appears to be ready to take that position soon. Compared to all the other video cards to date that have passed through this office, this is easily the fastest card we've ever seen. For detailed performance scores, please click on the performance tabs above and below this review.