ATI’s new RADEON is impressive, both on paper and in reality, beating the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600 across the board.

It may not look overly imposing at first glance: its clock speeds are comparable to the NVIDIA Ti4600, at 325MHz for the core and 620MHz for the RAM, but it goes beyond this in other areas. For example, it has double the memory interface and bandwidth (256-bit/20GBs compared to128-bit/10.4GBs) and also beats the pants off the GeForce4’s implementation of DirectX 8, with twice the Vertex Shader Engines and Pixel Pipelines (two versus four and four versus eight respectively).

The 9700’s GPU uses the 0.15 micron process, and packs in about 110 million transistors, almost twice that of the Ti4600.

All these transistors combined with an older fabrication process (0.13 micron is what NVIDIA will use on its upcoming successor to the GeForce4) has meant a significant increase in the size of the GPU – it almost has more in common with a modern CPU than a graphics processor. This extra hardware draws more power than the AGP slot can provide, and therefore requires additional help from the PSU (it uses a standard floppy drive connector).

For those less technically inclined, what all this geekspeak really means is this: the 9700 mops the floor with the competition.

We tested the 9700 against NVIDIA’s current flagship, the GeForce4 Ti4600. It delivers exactly what ATI promised: a certified GF4 killer.

The three cards we looked at (from Gigabyte, Hercules and Powercolor) all turned in virtually identical results (the difference was well under half a percent), so we’ve used an amalgamated score for the graphs below.

While the 9700 is a truckload faster in basic benchmarks (by up to 20%), where it really comes into its own is in high resolution gaming with lots of details; the extra bandwidth and features making a significant difference. In 3DMark’s Nature test (a heavy-hitting DirectX 8 scene), the 9700 scored 98fps, compared to the GF4 Ti4600’s 50.3fps.
The three cards tested were very similar; the Powercolor and Gigabyte cards are actually identical (right down to part numbers) save for their heatsinks. The real differences are price and bundled extras. If you just want the card itself, the Powercolor is the your best bet.

Hercules takes the other route, as it ships with the excellent RPG Morrowind. However, it’s around $100 more expensive than the Powercolor, so you’re actually paying for the game anyway. The Hercules does sport a better heat sink setup, so it should give better overclocking mileage though. Gigabyte’s card sits in the middle in terms of price, and offers more software than the Hercules. Unfortunately most of the games it ships with have been available for over 18 months.

There’s no doubt that the 9700 is the fastest consumer graphics card available, offering a good mix of performance and features to boot. If you’re looking for a new card (and have the cash) this one comes highly recommended.