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ATI's most advanced graphics card to date is the Radeon 9800 Pro and it is fitting that the Mac version debuted alongside the Power Mac G5, which Apple claims is the world's fastest desktop computer. In contrast to the G5 introduction, the retail Radeon 9800 Pro "press bonanza" was surprisingly low key for a flagship product release. Not since the original Radeon succeeded the Rage 128 has there been such an exponential leap in performance and features over previous graphics cards. Today we dig deeper into the heart of the Radeon 9800 Pro and attempt to explain the whiz-bang technologies that ATI engineers have spent so long developing. Here is an excerpt from the article;

The Radeon 9800 Pro is built around a completely new and incredibly complex graphics core — codenamed R350 — that contains 110 million transistors. To put that into perspective, the IBM PowerPC 970 processor found in the Power Mac G5 has 52 million transistors. Many of the Radeon 9800 Pro's transistors are dedicated to the 128-bit floating point rendering pipeline, which, in short, allows for more precise and realistic-looking images. A 10-bit per channel digital-to-analog converter (DAC) preserves much of that precision when it is output to the screen.

IMG Feature: Radeon 9800 Pro Technology Overview

Radeon 9800 Pro

ATI

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