Cripes, this review got old. PCI-E is here and going strong, having turned into a better value for the money, performancewise, than AGP is anymore. And they settled on calling it "PCI-E" instead of "PCI-X" so as to minimize confusion with the old and seldom-used server board standard of the same name.
The 9800 Pro is nearly the swan song of AGP. ATI's own Radeon X1600 comes in an AGP version for some danged reason or other, and is standing and will probably continue to stand as the fastest AGP graphics card ever made. For reference, the 9800 Pro is no slouch but it's far from the king anymore, as Moore's Law takes the toll it usually does.
Warning: The follwing review contains tangents™. It wasn't such a long time ago that I would have recommended against ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro. Though reigning as undisputed king of the PC video card world, the 9800 was a lousy value for the money, retailing at 500-600 dollars while being only a small margin faster than ATI's own Radeon 9700 Pro, which retailed for 300 dollars less.
Now, to the delight of framerate nuts everywhere, the tide has turned. With the promise of ATI's allegedly blistering fast new X800 board the 9700 has ceased to be, and the much sought after 9800 has dropped to 199.99 retail.
I was the FIRST person in the door of my local Computers'R'Us to buy one.
The 9800 Pro (not to be confused with ATI's Radeon 9800 XT, which is still 500 bucks) now ranks as the third fastest video card on the planet - Though that rank varies weather you include the 9800 XT, which is really not very much better and again a lousy value for the money, or the X800 which has the distinct disadvantage of not existing yet. Even in the face of this, third fastest is nothing to scoff at.
X800 aside, the future of the video card world is already promised to be turned on its ear when the new "PCI Express" standard debuts this summer, carrying lurid claims of cheap, power efficient, ridiculously fast video cards that will put all of us AGP luddites to shame.
Personally, I'm keeping a watchful eye but not getting too worried, because I foresee quite a bit of time between PCIx catching on and every Tom, Dick, and Harry video card company switching over to the .013 and .011 micron manufacturing processes that will make any of this even vaguely possible.
The kicker for us 9800 owners, of course, is that the guillotine is approaching in terms of upgradability. If AGP goes the way of ISA (Remember ISA slots? Didn't think so.) us luddites' problems will be twofold: Finding new cards to stick in our AGP slots, and finding boards with AGP slots to stick our pimpin' Radeons in, which we paid a boatload of money for.
None of this, however, is a great concern yet. My recommendation: Get a good AGP/ATX platform machine and stick a Radeon 9800 Pro in it and you'll have a good machine that will probably last you a good year or two (which is a very long time in computer land) before you even need to think about upgrading to anything new. Do not hold off and place all of your eggs in the basket of technology that doesn't exist yet, as you may find the wait too long for your liking and the cost of early adoption a little high for your tastes.
Back to the card.
AGP 8x DirectX 9 capable PC graphics accelerator, fast, one. The Radeon 9800 Pro is an all-singing, all-dancing 3d card with all the trimmings one would expect from a modern offering.
The numbers, for those suitably inclined, are 8 rendering pipelines fed by 128 megabytes of dedicated DDR memory ticking at 700 mhz, and with the core processor running at 380 mhz. This adds up to ATI’s alleged 3.04 gigatexel/second fill rate, more of which in a moment. These numbers are currently topped by ATI’s own 9800 XT, and very little else.
Installation is as straightforward as any video card: Unwrap it, crack the case on your computer, stick it in the slot, latch it down. In addition to being fast (obviously) the 9800 Pro is a power hungry little thing and requires not only an AGP 8x slot (compatibility will be dependent on your motherboard) but sports a hard drive style power socket right on the card to prevent the juice this card needs to suck from blowing the power supply portion of your motherboard. Booting without a spare power plug installed, by the way, gives a sad little message on startup about 3d acceleration being disabled, and verily it is until you shut down and jack the thing in to your power supply. The 9800 Pro's a very electrically intensive card - That is, you're going to need a good power supply to support its current draw in addition to everything else in your system. In addition, drawing lots of power makes lots of heat and good case ventilation is a must if you intend to keep your card and machine running at optimum stability. This is not some mainstream pantywaist budget video card - It's a high powered gamer's card that needs cooling and power accomodations made for it.
Drivers are included on a CD with the card, but as is the norm in graphics card land you’d best use that as a frisbee and go get the very latest version of ATI’s “Catalyst” drivers from their website instead - As there have invariably been 427 revisions between now and whenever that CD was pressed. The 9800 is happy enough to operate in driverless VGA only mode and you can install the drivers after installing the card with no trouble.
On the back you’ve got a regular old VGA port, an S-Video+ port, and a newfangled DVI port. The S-Video+ port carries S-Video (natch) and composite video to output to a TV. The DVI port is dual mode and can either run a DVI capable digital flat panel display or a second normal VGA display with the included adapter. The card supports native dual monitor output, in operating systems that support it (Win98 upwards, excluding NT4) between any combination of two of the three outputs. You can’t run all three at once, or at least not insofar as I am aware.
All this dual monitor tomfoolery is in 2d mode, mind you – The card can only output 3d to one of its monitors, namely the one you specify as primary when you set all of this up.
And set it up you shall, through ATI’s customized control panel pages under your display properties. Here you can set up your displays, acceleration and quality options, disable the blasted ATI icon in your system tray, and twiddle your VPU recover settings.
A word on that. ATI’s latest driver set supports a nifty bit called “VPU Recover” that allows the card to reset itself if it gets into a fatal snag with itself (listen up, overclockers) instead of taking your whole system down. This by and large borks whatever game you were running when the crash occurred, but beats sitting through a reboot and losing the downloads, browser page, and magnum opus you may or may not have on the back burner when all of this goes down. And it beats a Blue Screen of Death by a mile.
So drop the 9800 Pro into 3d mode and it goes. Fast.
On my system the 9800 PRO will pull something like
15500 3dmarks average at 1024x768x32 in 3dMark 2001SE (Still ye olde video card benchmarking standard, available at www.futuremark.com). This is on my already obsolete Athlon XP 2400+ system with a gig of DDR.
Compare this to 11000-sh on a Radeon 9600XT, 10000-ish on a GeForce FX 5600, and 6700-ish on a GeForce FX 5200. Also please to note that said GeForce FX 5600 retails for the same price as the 9800 Pro, since Nvidia hasn’t come up with anything to knock it into the lower price bracket (it used to share this one with the 9600XT).
The 9800 Pro is a fully DirectX 9 capable card, which is the current latest standard, and supports all of DX9’s pretty bits including pixel shaders, advanced particle effects, occlusion, and so on. This is not big news among the current crop of 3d cards, but the fact that the 9800 PRO can do these tricks without slowing to a crawl is. For an illustration, run 3dMark 2003 or the latest AquaMark and watch the 9800 PRO do some amazing sh*t.
In terms of the Big Number that gets everyone’s attention, 3dMark reports the Radeon 9800 Pro weighing in at 2979.6 Megatexels/second (2.97 Gigatexels/second compared to ATI’s promised 3.04, which isn’t an important gap). This is nothing to sneeze at, people.
In addition to sheer fire-breathing polygon pushing grunt, the 9800 Pro sports a smattering of ATI’s imaginatively named proprietary technologies like TruForm (which smooths out polygonal jaggies at the expense of 3d performance), SmoothVision (similar to anti-aliasing), and Hyper-Z Buffering (which just removes obscured polygons from the rendering pipeline before the card wastes time drawing them). Blisteringly fast 2d performance, hardware MPEG1/2/DVD decoding, and such are standard fare for any modern video card these days, even the lousy ones, and are hardly worth mention. But the 9800 Pro’s got them.
Benchmarks aside, the Radon 9800 Pro has run every modern game I’ve thrown at it with flying colors, insane resolutions, and all the pretty bits turned on. Slightly more conservative gamers will be pleased to find the 9800 topping out at 150-200 frames per second with the resolution and detail levels set to moderate in games like Unreal Tournament 2004, Splinter Cell, and Max Payne. An interesting discrepancy I found was Need for Speed: Underground actually running
too fast with this card at my usual resolution settings (re-enabling vsync solved the problem). Any hiccups or other framerate unpleasantness can probably be traced to the rest of the system rather than the video card.
As far as PC gamers are concerned at the moment, the Radeon 9800 Pro is the Business. The recent price change has made it an outstanding value for the money - A month ago gamers on a budget were happy to pay as much for a Radeon 9600XT, for a start. Couple this with a ridiculous amount of 3d processing power and we have ourselves a winner.
Highly recommended.
Additional Resources, for the motivated: 3dMark Benchmarks Available from http://www.futuremark.com
Latest ATI Catalysts and boilerplate available at http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
HardOCP Reviews the 9800 Pro: http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDM5
ViperLair Reviews the 9800 Pro: http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/video_graph/ati/radeon/9800pro/
HotHardware Compares the Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB) To High End GeForce FX's: http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.cfm?articleid=451&catid=2
Other Cards to consider:
Radeon 9800XT Radeon 9600/XT GeForce FX 5600 GeForce FX 5900 
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