ATI's Revolutionary Radeon 9700 Pro

A history on ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro. Check out more #GPUJune videos here:

0:00 PixelPipes Store Promo
0:19 Intro
3:45 History
11:42 About the card
15:04 Its legacy
18:22 Outtro

Platform specs:
Pentium E5800 @ 3.75GHz
2GB OCZ Platinum Ed. PC3200 @ 400MHz
ASRock 775i65G (Intel 865G)
128GB SATA SSD
Windows XP Professional SP3
Drivers:
-Radeon 9700 Pro: Catalyst 10.2 (Legacy)
-Radeon 8500: Catalyst 5.5

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[philscomputerlab]

Fantastic video! The 9700 Pro is one of my favourite graphics cards and it was such an exciting time compared to what we get these days...

[littlestarbright]

As his wife I can verify that he did, in fact, bring the card on our vacation lol.

It's so good to see all your hard work completed in such a fantastic way. This is your best video yet. 💙

[CuttingEdgeRetro]

Just seeing Mr Rodney Reynolds back in a video again takes me back. Very nice and in-depth video look at the good'ol 9700 pro

[SUCRA]

This video was legendary. A perfect tribute to an awesome piece of hardware. I couldn't be happier to support this channel considering the kind and form of content it brings. On another note, this video will be a great reference for my own next week. If the big brother and the little brother out to battle next week had a middle sister, it would be the Radeon 9700 pro. Thanks for your work!

[MadMac]

I loved this video, and I loved my 9700 Pro when I bought it used in 2004. I do find it amusing that the interview clip with John Carmack had him talk about how fast the R300 could render real-time shadows, though. When Doom 3 was first released, the cards in the R300 family were under-performing until a programmer in the community realized that the driver calls for computing shadows were remarkably inefficient. He wrote a patch that replaced those instructions with more simple equivalent math, and performance increased by a VERY noticeable amount! It was so good that ATI integrated it into their next Catalyst driver revision, and it was mostly forgotten after that. I still have the file, even though it's not needed anymore unless one is using Catalyst drivers from before 4.9 or so.

[repatch]

Was part of the verification team at ATI in Markham for the R300 (Khan). It was a BEAST, it stretched all our tools and processes trying to fit, but we got it done. Still remember some of the issues that were discovered. This video brought back alot of memories, thanks!

[necro_ware]

Very nice video! I remember, that I desperately wanted to get a 9700 Pro, but as a student, I just didn't have the money to buy it. But there was a solution! With some luck you could modify a 9500. Shorting two contacts with a drop of electric varnish you could enable all 8 pipelines and with some overclocking get it on the level of the 9700 Pro. This was what I did eventually and I had luck. I added a better cooler and even overclocked the card over the usual 9700 Pro frequencies. I used the card for a quite long time and still think, that it was one of the biggest steps in real time 3d graphics technology.

Thanks for the memories!

[mapley]

My day was genuinely made brighter when I saw this pop up after a long day. Thanks!

[NightMotorcyclist]

I made the jump from a GeForce Ti4200 Golden Sample from Gainward to an ATi Radeon 9700 Pro when I built a brand new system based around the nForce 2 Ultra kitted with an Athlon XP 2500+ and 512MB of DDR1 Corsair CMX Platinum which allowed me to OC the CPU to 3200+ levels at a much lower price. The jump was incredible and I was playing all my current games at higher res on my 19" Trinitron monitor. I remember working for 3 months to save up the cash (fast food and being a teen meant minimum wage) after hearing the news of the pending release and bought the card a few weeks after release.

[RetroGPUsandBuilds]

Oh man! The legendary 9700 pro, the card that sparked my collection addiction after I found it in a box 2 years ago. I enjoyed every minute of the video. Just Excellent in all regards 👍

[revntok]

I had both a 9700 and a 9800 Pro they were fantastic graphics cards and ones I won't soon forget. I miss those times.

[andrewpomianowski]

This was a remarkable product to be a part of working on - I spent many hours developing pre-silicon verification tests, and then later on driver optimizations, including for Doom, as well as the adaptive anti-aliasing technology. I felt incredibly fortunate to get the chance to work on it.

[aemerox]

I ended up buying one on Ebay... you guys were telling the truth!

[PunmasterSTP]

The editing with the Animusic music playing in the background in the beginning was fire 🔥

[raresmacovei]

The 2002 era 9700 Pro could play games "3 years after it launched".

Meanwhile most people: were playing Crysis, Timeshift, Half-Life 2 EP2, STALKER, CoD4, Gears of War, Portal, Jade Empire, Halo 2, Resident Evil 4, in 2007 and 2008,

The longevity of 9700 Pro was only recently eclipsed by the RX 470/480/570/580, GTX 1060 and GTX 980 Ti.

[bz]

The cinematography in this episode is simply amazing, wonderful video! Also I learned the 9700 Pro Released on my birthday .

[gen_angry]

I was fresh out of high school when this came out, this was the card I always wanted but could never afford back then. I believe every computer nerd has that one piece of hardware they always wanted to get but couldn't afford at the time. Mine was the 9700 Pro. Nearly 20 years later, I finally put a 9800 pro in a 2003-2004 era P4 rig. Thing shreds...

[Justin-doll]

Excellent video. And I love that I got to see Rodney Reynolds recommend another Kickass product just a few minutes in. That earns a sub. Thanks dude.

[RETROHardware]

I like this video style, you are best teacher, good work!

[kuolastech]

Good to see Radeon 9700 Pro taking vacations and enjoying retirement.