Think about it, back in the day we would get great sound cards, great graphics cards and the leaps and bounds were actual leaps and bounds. Now it's like well you can play this game at 4k at 120FPS vs 60FPS.
@@C4nn15 You know when even decade + old computers with 8GB DDRII, an OC AMD Athlon II X4, a cheap SSD, and with a lowend GPU like an AMD R7 240 2GB can still run many modern titles at 720p - 1080p low settings getting 60fps, or close too it running a lightweight Linux Distro like Manjaro Mate then we have hit a peak of sorts in terms of tech IMHO! I truly don't get the excitement these days that I did back in the 80's - mid 00's seeing each leap forward in tech.
@@CommodoreFan64 My current system is from 2012 with only a GPU upgrade to a 1050 Ti, and I can _still_ play most games at decent settings, at 1080p. Granted, it's definitely time for an upgrade, but considering I've gotten _9 years_ out of this platform, it's certainly much different from how things used to be. I recently acquired a Pentium II-based IBM Aptiva, and a system like that would have been hopelessly obsolete by the time this card (Radeon 9700 Pro) would debut, despite its very high performance just five years prior.
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. 💙
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!
Same fond memories of unlocking and overclocking the snot out of my 9500. While my memory clocks were never terribly impressive my core went to the moon!
thank God someone mentioned this. Good old days! P.S. - I never had the money to afford myself those Radeon cards. But I knew about all of them and all their capabilities and possibilities. Wonderful memories.
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...
I was just entering high school at this point and remember how the 9500 Pro was the overclocking champion, the 9700 NP (non-Pro) could be modded/overclocked to insane levels, and the 9800 Pro couldn't be beaten by NV even once they finally showed up to the party. I wish I hadn't thrown out the cards I had back then ("those slow old things haven't been relevant in years, why do I hoard this junk" mentality) but I have rebuilt my collection with a 9500 Pro, 9800 Pro, as well as X1950 XT and FX 5950 Ultra (always wanted one but they were too expensive). Fortunately I still have the same computer as I did then. I keep my 5600 Ultra in there to keep the power supply load easy (this is when PSUs had a max output of about what my 3080 pulls) with the same 60 GB WD hard drive though I have maxed the board out at 1 GB of RAM (up from 128MB) and it has Windows 7 because back then it was amazing how it could run on "only" 1GB of RAM. Back before Roku sticks this was my streaming machine once its duties as gaming machine were retired.
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 👍
This card was also one of the first cards I added to my collection a few years ago. I technically had stuff before then but I didn't consider it a collection until then.
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.
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!
Back in the days i couldn´t afford the Radeon 9700 so i waited for Radeon 9500. I bought a Gigabyte Maya II and it was quite good. The Omega Driver set the 9500 on Fire... it was awesome.
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.
ATi: your confidence is your weakness Nvidia: And the faith in your cards is yours And with directX 10 Ati went from original trilogy to Disney trilogy.
I had it, back in the day. I remember the beast it was. It was impressive. People used to perceive it like we perceive the RTX 4090 nowadays : the Holy Grail of GPUs ^^
I could not hit "Like" on this fast enough! This was my first GPU upgrade way back in the early 2000s. A phenomenal, legendary GPU that for me personally introduced me to the hobby of PC Hardware. I wouldn't have the enthusiasm I have today were it not for this card. Kudos to you for producing this excellent content! A story I like to share is that my father was using our old family Dell Dimension 8200 as a USB charger. Yes, the very one that I upgraded with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro in 2003! I went home to visit probably sometime in 2017 and he had this desktop tower plugged into an electrical outlet and nothing else connected to it except for his cell phone. Inside was my original ATI Radeon 9700 Pro slaving away, fully powered on, simply so he could charge his cell phone. Needless to save I promptly unplugged the machine and took it home with me where it still resides to this day. I still have the original box which I will always cherish.
Radeon 9800 XT is when things got really good. Also something really cool, ArtX designed the GPU on the Gamecube and since ATI bought them once the design was done the Gamecube GPU is 100 percent ArtX design. The Gamecube TEV was all them. Amazing.
This is a great video! I personally have it's slightly-stronger sibling the 9800 Pro, and it was absolutely wild to play with a card that put NVIDIA *below* ATI, something that now-a-days is just a pipedream! I need to rebuild my Socket 754 machine and get that card back up and running ASAP.
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!
The first PC upgrade I convinced my dad of was a Radeon 9600 SE - I had heard about the legendary 9700 Pro but was too young to know what a 64-bit memory bus meant and how cut down that card was compared to its bigger brother. Later I referred to the card as the 9600 Sucky Edition lol. Funny now looking back at that with the recent 6500XT 64-bit bus controversy!
So this video's the reason all the 9700s are expensive right now! XD Great video, Nathan! I, too, could only ever dream of owning one of these beasts back in the day.
Oh yeah.. the 9700pro was the single most extended use video card I ever had. Used it for many years. I still have it in the box on the shelf too. Loved Pipe Dream! I still have that installed on my current computers. It even runs, and looks amazing 🤩, with my Nvidia 3d vision monitor and glasses setup.
A bit late to the party, but this vid had me looking over my small gpu collection...I pulled the 9700 out and admired the job I did putting heatsinks on everything, and the artic-cooling silencer that replaced the original hsf....also took a look at the x800 pro I'd flashed to XT (successfully btw), and that one has a big copper Zalman hsf on it....thanks for the memories.
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.
Nice, I had the good fortune to live through this time as a PC enthusiast. I didn't get the 9700 Pro, instead I went for the 9700 and flashed the bios and turned it into a PRO
I remember going from my GF4 Ti4600 to the 9700 Pro when it launched and being in awe at how much faster it was. Even more so as the drivers developed.
This is my favorite GPU of all time. It's such a compact powerhouse. Oh dude you freaking nailed it again. I paused the video to type something about ArtX and you are already all over the scene. A+++
These were such a great times for computer technology to evolve. In fact then we could really see revolution with almost every generation of hardware. Something like this can not happen today. Pity. My colleague had 9800Pro and it was a BLAST on our whole neighbourhood. Nothing could compete with that monster at that time.
@David Bolha i tried to unlock mine with modified ATI drivers. While it did work and I was able to get extra pipelines working, there were artifacts on screen. For instance, I'd have a mesh of equally spqced rectangles on the screen along with visible video distortion.
I went to CompUSA(remember them?) and they didn't have any 9700 Pros in stock, so I headed over to Best Buy and they had ONE left. I brought it home to replace my 8500 and was blown away by the speed. It was so fast that it was CPU limited. When I replaced my CPU the next year my minimum FPS went up a ton. Eventually replaced it with a 6800 GT which was faster but not nearly as cool.
Amazing video man! This card was easily one of my favorites. I remember using thermal adhesive on pennies and stacking them on the memory chips to use as heatsinks 😁
Never had a 9000s card but always looked at them with awe...these were the best days.. unlocking driver features with tools an if you was lucky enabling extra shader pipes like was it on the 9600 to 9700pros an the 6600 from Nvidia had versions that could be turned into 6800s... I looked at my locked shaders in my 6600gt in riva tuner an wishing I could unlock them...tho my 6600gt was as quick as a stock 6800 in most stuff due to the insane clocks it had...but still those extra 8 shaders an 4 vertex shaders would of been a treat...an the fact they was physically on my chip made me cry
That's a lot of research! Well, I learned a lot in this video, because the 8500 was the last graphics card I bought brand new. Since then I've been quite a few generations behind, so I completely missed the significance of the 9700 at the time.
Aww man! Brings back fond memories! Water cooled Athlon xp 2500+ and volt modded 9700 pro on GPU and memory. I remember ripping off the voltage regulator on the back with the heat spreader in it 😢wanting to put a proper heatsink on it! I got a nice O.C from it until one day I come back to the pc in two colour mode, just black n white. CPU waterblock leaked onto my beloved Radeon!
When Doom 3 alpha leaked (late 2002), the average graphics cards at the time could only run it as a slideshow at low-medium settings... this card could run it just fine at high quality.
I'm late to this party but well done sir! The choice of the animusic demo was brilliant. I loved that thing back in the day. I could not afford the 9700 pro or the 9700 but I did buy the 9500 and hard modded to 9700 status (unlocked 4 extra pipes!) and played all these demos you were running to check it out. I was ecstatic with the frames I was getting from an inexpensive 9500. That mod is worth a video too. Eventually drivers came out that soft modded it. The Omega drivers. I had forgotten this whole era in the long history of my PC hobby and that is just sad! This video brought that all back so accurately and lovingly. Somehow I missed GPU June when it ran but I'll check out the playlist. Liked and subbed!
I never had a 9700 Pro, I went from the Geforce 3 and wanting a 9700 pro to having a 9800 pro given to me. Had to wait, but that was pretty cool. It was given to me because the guy who have it to me had damaged the DVI connector. I cleaned that up with tweezers and it worked perfectly.
The performance benefit of the 9700 Pro was massive in comparison to the 8500LE that I had before it. My 9700 Pro was the AIW version. I had to get the AIW as the regular 9700 Pro was not in stock at the time. Computer stores in my area couldn't keep them in stock due to their popularity. They were also creaming FX series GPU's from nVidia. It was only when the 6800 GT came out that I replaced my 9700 Pro AIW with it, when VRAM was now becoming a focal point of future gaming.
I loved my 9700 pro. A Hercules 3D Prophet. With a blue PCB. When the cruddy little fan by Hercules died after a few months I bolted an Arctic Cooling Silencer onto it. It still works as well, which is getting quite rare for AGP cards from that era. Though I'm not quite sure if it's more revolutionary then for example a Voodoo, Riva TNT, Geforce256, or later the Geforce 8 / Radeon 2000. Especially the latter were a big revolution, with the introduction of true parallelisation with unified shaders and such.
Ugh this video really reminds how special gpus can be. My history;Ti4200>9700pro>7800gtx>8800GTX>GTX580>290x>Vega 64. The 9700pro, 8800GTX and Vega 64 have far and away been my best cards. Wasn't lucky enough to dodge the mining boom this time, but Vega 64 is still a great card, and it's professional grade pcb underpinnings has made it a godsend to someone who works with 3 monitors without high idle vram cooking the room, even if it showing its age in the newest games. priorities of getting old. lol
I also have very fond memorys of the card. In fact, it is the only ATI/AMD Card i have ever used (as in my top tier system) in all of my years of PC (Gaming), apart from the Rage 2+ in my first PC. Coming from a originally-not-so-shabby Geforce 2 Ultra, i was amazed by its DX9 graphics and, thanks to its wide design, the ease it seemed to have running all titles at high resolutions with anisotropic filtering and even FSAA. i dont know how many hours i clocked in elder scrolls III morrowind with it, must have been easily four-digit... like you, later i moved on to a 6800 GT to feed that sparkling new 1680*1050pixel TFT on my desk, but even than it still didnt felt like a completely outdated card and was still able to run new titles (with a bit more modest quality settings) until the DX10 age came around.
The leap in performance at the time was stellar, the drivers were relatively crap though when compared with nVidia detonator drivers. it ran so hot too.
I remember playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on an old family computer with ATI 9000 series cards. A P4 1.7ghz that I upgraded to 2ghz. Socket 423. COD 4 was 5yrs after those cards releases.
@@PixelPipes thanks man. I still have the little brother of this beast fully working. I used it until 2007 then upgraded to an Nvidia 8400gs.... it overheated so much and worked so badly that in a couple of months upgraded to a 9600 GT Super.
I remember going from a heavily modified and overclocked Nvidia GeForce 4 4400, to a heavily modified and overclocked Sapphire ATi Radeon 9800 Pro when my roommate upgraded to a Sapphire ATi Radeon X850 Pro (that he pretty much instantly modified and overclocked) and was blown away at how huge the difference was not only in performance, but over all picture and rendering quality. ATi was absolutely killing it, and even as Nvidia started catching back up and eeking back their performance lead, their picture and render quality still lagged behind side by side. This being the era of the CRT still, ATi was better at both its 3d rendering and all of the digital side, while providing superior clarity, color reproduction and overall analog performance as well. This to me, was the most fun time in the computer industry as a whole.
I had in my possession one of the Sapphire version of this card with the passive heatsink. Some years ago we built a computer for family member who didnt have a computer at the time and It was decided that we would give them this graphics card. I was against the idea but the 9700 pro belonged to my dad who didnt really understand the whole obesession with old hardware... we havent seen or heard anything about that computer since and every time i see anything about a 9700 pro - I cry a little inside. Unfortunately the card wasnt mine so i couldnt decide its fate and I repeatedly told my dad that it was going to be worth quite a few bucks one day...
I had one back than but it was Radeon 9500 (4 pipes with 256bit memory - L patern) unlocked to 9700 (8 pipes) via OMEGA drivers, but when unlocked it was unable to reach 325MHz clock, but at all it was really nice thing for free.
I put the 9800 Pro in my first ever build back in 2004 and it was an excellent card. When I upgraded to a PCIX System 2 years later with a Geforce 7800GT I was really let down because the video quality was not a huge improvement over my old system with the 9800 Pro. I believe like you said that ATI was years ahead of the game
I had a nVidia Leadtek WinFast GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or 4600 don't remember exactly. With Athlon XP 2500+ overclocked to about 3200+ EpoX motherboard or the nForce motherboard because I had tried both boards (and more) don't remember exactly. Then I got the Sapphire 9800 Pro 128Mb I had flashed to a 9800XT just for device manager glory & boot up recognition although moment of owning it was the top dog before XT. I still have some of this stuff in my garage. I remember this was the time when PC market strated to boom with fancy hardware & cases to choose from. I had by the time the ThermalTake Xaser II 6000A aluminium finish that had swapped already many hardware AMD combos with many nVIDIA cards & the ATi card mentioned above. Now btw I had built a modern PC in that case for my self the 2070 Super fitted very tightly can be found on my channel. The second built 2080 Super PC that has the new Phanteks Enthoo Evolv X Mid-Tower Galaxy Silver case with Corsair 150Pro AIO for CPU, 128Gb DDR4, Xeon 2678 @ 3.3Ghz TurboUnlock on all 12 cores.
Gotta hand it to ATI/AMD: When they find a basic architecture that works, they stick with it and only move on when they've truly hit a wall that can't be beaten by either fattening up the architecture or speeding it up. The basic R300 design was carried through to the X1000 series, only being replaced in mid 2008 by Terascale. Terascale (after a big misstep in the HD2000 series) lasted the entire DX10 Era and was in the high end until 2012. And GCN, oh GCN: it's still punching well above it's weight almost TEN YEARS post release, and will probably continue to do so for a few more years thanks to AMD planning to port their DLSS competitor to Vega (GCN 5) and Polaris (GCN 4) . Even the 7970 (GCN 1) still more than delivers the goods if you're willing to tweak settings in modern AAA games (3 GB is just enough if you're careful with your settings). Realistically if you still have a midrange to top end GCN card in your system, you're still good to go until the current stupidity with GPU prices end (unless you have a GCN 1 card and you want to play a DX12 only game). Try doing that with a nVidia card from 2012.
My very first power gaming system I built had this as a component. DFI LANParty nForce2 motherboard 4 x 256MB DDR Corsair AMD 3200+ processor ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card
This was my card for many years. I had the reference board with 128mb. Even far cry could run okay on fairly high settings with this on my athlon 2400+ XP with 1 gig of ram. Doom 3 even could be run on the highest setting playable (while the game said it needed a 512 meg card for that and doom being optimized for nvidia architecture. This was a BEAST.
