Conclusions
I believe I've said enough about the Radeon 9700 Pro by now. You have seen the results and screenshots for yourself, and you know that it's got more pixel-pushing power, faster pixel shaders, better vertex shaders, more poly throughput, and better real-world performance than any other graphics card you can buy. The image quality is second to none, especially with antialiasing enabled. I've racked my brains and raked this thing over the coals trying to find a significant weakness, and I'll tell you what: I haven't found one.

Oh, sure, there are always odd driver bugs, incompatiblities, and other teething problems, and I won't pretend to be able to keep tabs on all of those things. (The card was problem-free in my testing.) If you're thinking about buying a Radeon 9700 Pro card, you'll definitely need to factor those considerations into your decision.

But as a 3D graphics chip, the Radeon 9700 is darn near perfect. ATI has taken the time with this chip to increase precision and expand registers and tweak functional units to the point where everything works as advertised. The Radeon 8500, good as it was, was nowhere near this good.

We may run into some problems or limitations when DirectX 9 arrives in force. I'm still a little wary about how this first generation of chips with support for 64- and 128-bit color depths will perform at those depths. The data throughput and computational requirements for 128-bit pixels are enormous, and that presents every opportunity to fudge by splitting 128-bit chunks into two and the like. Tricks like that could sap performance and cause problems with next-gen games. Of course, those games probably won't be arriving for months and months.

110 million transistors of joy

At the end of the day, the Radeon 9700 Pro is the culmination of an era and the beginning of something new. The 9700 is the last in a line, the ultimate graphics chip as a collection of fixed functional units that accelerate specific parts of the rendering process in hardware. But it also ushers in the era of generally programmable graphics chips, VPUs as general SIMD machines. As programmability and high-level shading languages gain a foothold, graphics chips will probably become both simpler and more powerful—general SIMD processors with less custom circuitry for accelerating specific effects.

The 9700 bridges these two eras, running today's games better than anything else, and providing the potential for artists to create graphics unlike anything you have ever seen done in real time.