ATI Radeon 9700 Pro - Delivering as Promised

The Drivers

ATI supplied us with WHQL certified drivers that the Radeon 9700 Pro is currently shipping with based off of the CATALYST 2.2 platform. The drivers look and feel just like the other CATALYST releases with two changes that are R300-specific.

First, the quality/performance antialiasing settings are gone because of the R300's support for multisampling AA. You can choose 2X, 4X or 6X multisampled AA modes from the control panel.

The only other change is the inclusion of performance/quality radio buttons for anisotropic filtering. The performance mode appears to be identical to the anisotropic filtering on the Radeon 8500 (except with Trilinear support), while the quality mode properly handles situations where there is rotation along the z-axis.

We did not run into any major issues with the Radeon 9700 Pro's drivers although a few minor bugs did crop up. The most irritating was that we had to reboot our testbed after switching antialiasing or anisotropic filtering modes between Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmarks otherwise the new settings would not take effect.