Today I discovered a fact that made parts of our Radeon 9800 pro review obsolete. On page 14, which you can read here, we talk about architectural improvements in the R350. Our tests showed that at the same clockspeed using the same drivers the 9800 Pro was 5-10 % faster than the 9700 Pro.
Apparently we didn’t see the whole truth.
Tommti-Systems has found out a way to make the 9700 Pro benefit from driver optimizations that were intended for the 9800 Pro. Thomas of Tommti hasn’t published the actual method yet but his findings certainly indicate that the 9700 Pro and the 9800 Pro would perform almost identical while using the same clock frequencies.
Thus the performance benefits we saw have little/nothing to do with the R350 architecture but were rather software optimizations.
We apologize for our assumptious behavior and once we get a chance to test it further we will update our preview accordingly.
Consider that this info concerns all other preview that you may have read too.
Please note that the drivers we used were not intended for Radeon 9700 Pro to begin with. Perhaps the Catalyst 3.2 will sport these optimizations for both architectures. Let’s just say that we won’t try to pass any judgement just yet.
We’ve contacted ATi and are awaiting their reply.
Read all about the tests here. The site is in german but the interesting part is the numbers and graphs.
