ATi Mobility Radeon 9700 (M11) article - Page 5

Please explain this expression.

Sorry, only 23 and new to IT industry. What does that mean?

It means you have much to learn, young grasshopper.

The facts are : 256MB of RAM is not going to afford a 100% improvement over the 128MB RAM - Even 1024MB of RAM will not offer the improvement and could "potentially" hurt performance.

You HAVE to remember that the M-10 is clocked at 350Mhz and the M-11 at 450Mhz. 100Mhz will be critical with the extra 256MB of RAM.

The Difference will not be in terms of FPS if you are playing with graphics/textures etc. set at low. Make everything HIGH and EXTRA and then you will see that while the M-10 chokes - the M-11 will keep steady. Thats where the extra RAM makes a difference...

And that's where you're wrong GSFerrari. Like I said before Im no expert, but all the experts I have read commenting on the issue agree that a 9600XT (=M11) CANNOT held newer games with "everything HIGH and EXTRA" as you put it, meaning max res with AA/AF on. The M11 will choke on those too, because only desktop 9700 and over cards have got the brutal strengh to pull out such a graphical performance.

In order to benefit from 256 mb, you've got to first of all cope up will all the bells and whisles turned on and full throttle, and the 9600XT cannot do it.

A 256 mb VRAM on that card is like having a 450 horsepower Porsche 911 turbo driving in a local country side off-lane: no point at all because you will never squeez out that engine.


Cheers.

What about max AA/AF with 800x600 or 1024x768 or 1440x900? What is the impact of more memory in that scenario? I'd rather run a game at high AF/AA and medium rez than run it at high rez and no AF/AA. And if the 256MB helps--that's great. And again what about an OC'd 9700. On this board are 9600 chips OC'd almost 75Mhz. What about a 9700 running at 500? Will the memory help then?

The problem with the benchmarks is that they don't cover the scenarios we're discussing.

I never run games higher than SXGA - I dont turn on AF or AA - I set detail/textures high and it still looks good. Have to try with the AA/AF etc. but I wont go higher than SXGA res...

WTB - you're probably right - lets wait and see...

1. It's an extra 1-3 fps when running around 90fps (which was the example we have used in UT2003). When running around 25 fps, that would translate into less 1 fps if your talking about running around 25fps that would buy you slightly less than 1 extra frame.
2. The low-K process has already been fully leveraged to allow the 450MHz clockspeed. They ran the 9600 as high as they could, and now they're running the 9700 as high as they can.
3. If there are games with big enough textures to use 256MB then those same games are going to need huge memory bandwidth, which the mobility cards don't have because they have very slow memory clocks. In practice modern games have several levels of texture detail so if you forced the use of super high textures on a 256MB version it would run like a dog while using middle detail textures on the 128MB would probably run OK, if you follow.

The basic premise here, and more than one person has already pointed this out but some people seem to have missed it, is that the mobility 9700 isn't powerful enough to benefit from the extra memory. It has neither the memory clockspeed nor core clockspeed/power to run at the sort of texture and quality (AA/Aniso) levels where having the extra memory counts.

Oh, and yes it can be a bad thing to have more memory - often when they double the memory for marketing purposes they use cheaper, slower memory resulting in poorer performance than the card with less memory. crazy, but absolutely true.

OK, in demanding games (which I guess is what we are all talking about) the mobility 9700 will only just be fast enough to run high detail at resolutions like 1024x768 and 1280x1024. There's no spare performance to run AA and Aniso and the extra memory ain't gonna help that - it's a core speed and memory bandwidth problem, not a memory amount problem.

That goes double for 1440x900.

As for running at 800x600 with those effects on, well you don't need 256MB of memory to run any game now, or likely any future game at 800x600. Plus, remember that running LCD panels at non native aleays looks pretty krappy, especially a low non-native like 800x600. Any game looks miles better at 1280x1024 native but no AA or Aniso, than 800x600 interpolated with aniso and AA.

hmmm...

Lets say I have 128MB clocked at say 225Mhz and the core at 450Mhz - AND I have 256MB clocked at 225Mhz and core at 450Mhz - Which will perform better.

I think the 256MB will perform better...

However - it is true that they often use slower cheaper memory - this is the case with Budget laptops and Desktops - not with high end graphics cards and certainly not in a situation where the competition is so fierce with nVidia. That would be suicide.

As of now I believe that a 256MB M-11 will trump a 128MB M-10 under any condition. I also think that the 256MB M-11 will perform just as well as a 128MB M-11

Its gonna be interesting - Anyone know what the memory clock speed is on the Mobility Radeon 9700 ??

Core is at 450Mhz - what about the mem??

As to the last point--you are quite correct, slow memory = bad memory, didn't think about that. We will have to hope that Sager didn't do that in this case.

As to the first point--it is Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too early to be suggesting that. For all we know you could be right, or you could be off by 50Mhz or more. Until people start overclocking their 9700, we won't know if the process has been fully leveraged.

As to your other points, you may be right, but I'll wait for real-world tests (primarily due to my points immediately above).


Cheers

Trevor

Oh ant BTW - I know from experience that the 128MB Radeon 9000 doesnt offer much performance difference from the 64MB Radeon 9000 - I have seen this on benchmarks - BUT - In real world gaming the 128MB Radeon 9000 just looked better because I could up the textures and world detail to a greater extent than I could on the 64MB version.

Sure we can't know for sure until we've tried overclocking. But you can be sure that ATI wanted the fastest chip they could produce and there are clear and established parameters fro setting clockspeeds for mobile chips. ATI (well the notebook manufacturer, actual, each notebook is clocked slightly differently) would not ship the chip running at 450MHz if it is just as reliable running at 500MHz - all the notebook manufacturers want the best performance allowed by the thermal properties of the chip and each given chassis. Now, sometimes the performance of a chip in a notebook is disappointing and so they have to sail close to the wind to crank up performance (eg the 9600 in the dell 8600 which has problems). but the bottom line is that ATI want the performance crown and will ship the chips running as fast as economics and reliability allow.

It will clock between 250 and 300MHz depending on the notebook.

One more reason why the 256MB version might be a bad idea: The thermal properties of a notebook are very critical. More memory chips means more heat and it is possible that the extra heat could force both the core and mem clocks to be lowered so that the total heat produced is the same as when you have half the amount of memory running faster. I'm not saying this has to be the case, but if it was it would make the 256MB version slower. Having more memory only makes a card faster (barrring AA and aniso which we've covered) if it saves it from doing AGP texture fetches. That isn't something that happens frequently (if ever) on a 128MB card in current games, and not in the foreseeable future either.

Caboose,

Question: Can you, or can you not overclock the 9600 on Sagers?
Answer: You can.

Question: Isn't it then better to wait and see whether you can overclock the 9700 on Sager, rather than arguing you can't despite the fact there are no notebooks with the chip out yet, and prior experience suggests you can?
Answer: Yes.

I don't want to be a jerk here, and I'm not going to argue the point further, but your same argument could have been made about the 9600, and experience tells us that it wouldn't have been correct (hows that for a tense). So I'm disinclined to believe it when made about the 9700. Whether or not you are correct vis-a-vis Dells and other notebooks, isn't particularly relevant--this discussion evolved out of the 256MB 9700 in the upcoming Sager 8790.

Now it may turn out that you are corect and the 9700 cannot be OC'd, we'll see when we have working noteooks.

Cheers,
Trevor

Hmm,

I was wondering what the video memory is used for in the first place. Is it just used to store graphic textures or something else? I was thinking that maybe a 256 MB video card may show some improvement in games such as Flight Simluator 2004 over a 128 MB card but maybe I'm wrong. Let me know what you think..

I think we may be misunderstanding each other: I never said you won't able to overclock the 9700 in sager notebooks, all I'm saying is that there's no reason to expect it will overclock better than the 9600.

You know what we need? We need a laptop with a port on the side to which we can fix modular 3D Cards (External) that have their own fans etc. - this way we dont have to worry about cooling, we can use desktop 3D Cards and it will still be a direct connection to the motherboard

Aah - that will be JUST AWESOME

I think PCI Express and ExpressCard may accomplish just that. Modular components plugging directly into a fast PCI Bus....sweet...

A 256MB card would be able to hand more and higher res textures, but given the raw power of the mobility 9800 and the low memory bandwidth it the result would be pretty horrific frame rates.

nVidia are working on an open standard notebook 3D card form factor, it will be internal of course, but if it suceeds then we'll have genuine notebook video upgrades - unlike alienware for which you're relying on them releasing upgrade cards.