ATI Mobility Radeon 9000: Raising the bar again

Conclusion

ATI is really pushing the envelope on video cards with the announcement of the Mobility Radeon 9000. Not only does the chip bring to market some needed speed and features, it is also available in notebook systems as of today. Both of these aspects of the Mobility Radeon 9000 make it the mobile graphics chip of choice today as well as the foreseeable future. Let's go over a bit of what we learned.

First off, in many gaming situations the Mobility Radeon 9000 is able to offer substantial performance increases over the GeForce4 440 Go, on the order of around 20-25%. In others benchmarks, like two specific levels in Unreal Tournament 2002 and in at least one level of Serious Sam 2, the performance increase is not so pronounced (5-10%). The times that the performance difference is pronounced can mean the difference between playing a game smooth or choppy at a high resolution. The times when the performance difference is not as large, you are still left with the highest performing mobile GPU available, although by a fairly trivial amount.

Secondly, the largest advantage that the Mobility Radeon 9000 has over its competitors is its DirectX 8.1 compatibility. The introduction of pixel and vertex shaders is a huge step forward for the mobile community and further closes the gap between desktops and notebooks. DirectX 8 compatibility is necessary if you wish to play the games of tomorrow and since a laptop video chip can't just be swapped out for a new one, getting the best mobile GPU on the market at the time of purchase is very important if you like your 3D games.

We are not the only ones who were impressed with the functionality and speed that the Mobility Radeon 9000 offers. John Carmack of iD Software echoed our sentiments in comments that he made for the Mobility Radeon 9000 launch. The brains behind Quake III and Doom 3, Carmack had the following to say about the Mobility Radeon 9000:

"The M9 laptop part allows state of the art high end game development to be accomplished on a laptop platform for the first time really since we've moved to hardware acceleration."

If that ringing endorsement doesn't whet your appetite, try another thing Carmack said on for size:

"You know, on our current work at Id right now we're still pushing really hard to make Doom run well on various high end desk top cards. So it's pretty startling to be able to fire it up on a laptop and see it run at a really pretty startling good pace."

That's right. Carmack stated that Doom 3 will be able to run smoothly on a mobile platform powered by a Mobility Radeon 9000. A next generation, highly intensive game able to run on a laptop. Why can the Mobility Radeon 9000 succeed where other mobile chips are sure to fail? It is because of the pixel and vertex shaders incorporated into the chip as well as the fast 4 pixel pipeline that it employs.

Obviously the Mobility Radeon 9000 does not exist in a vacuum; there are always competing chips on the horizon that threaten to dethrone the current king. First off there is Trident's latest addition to the video chip market, the XP4, which will undoubtedly find its way into the mobile market. The problem is that we do not know how far off the mobile XP4 is or exactly what the performance of the chip will be. Then there is NVIDIA's next generation mobile chip likely based off of the NV31 core. Details on the NV31 are even more scarce than details on the NV30 so we don't really know what or when to expect NVIDIA's next mobile part.

However, with Carmack's words and our benchmarks you should feel confident that a Mobility Radeon 9000 powered mobile system will be able to handle the games of today (Jedi Knight 2/Serious Sam 2), the near future (Unreal Tournament 2003), and the far future (Doom 3) which marks the first time we have been able to make such a statement about a mobile chip.