The MAYA II

Instead of going through the specifications and technology of the RADEON 9700 Pro in detail, we've decided to pass that along this time around as we're pretty sure that most of you would have read all that mumbo-jumbo elsewhere. If you're curious about the technology behind the RADEON 9700 VPU, you can read all about it from ATI's website or you can find some very well written technology articles elsewhere.

In a nutshell, the ATI RADEON 9700 PRO is powerful and is packed with all the fascinating technology that you'll ever need to make gaming even more enjoyable. For one, the RADEON 9700 Pro will be compatible with all the new features integrated into Microsoft's upcoming DirectX 9.0 release. The VPU will feature Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 2.0 which forms part of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0 requirements. In addition to that, the RADEON 9700 VPU also feature eight 128-bit floating point pixel rendering pipelines - more than what the GeForce4 or RADON 8500 can offer. Just to give you an idea, the GeForce4 and RADEON 8500 comes with only four 64-bit integer rendering pipelines. The key here is between integer and floating point pipelines. The floating point unit produces more accurate numbers and that results in more lifelike renders as compared to graphics rendered by an integer pipeline.

Currently, ATI ships the faster version of the RADEON 9700 which they call it the RADEON 9700 Pro. It is clocked at 325MHz and it uses DDR memory running at 310MHz (620MHz DDR). The slower RADEON 9700 will be introduced later and will be clocked lower than the current 9700 Pro. The table below will give you an idea where the RADEON 9700 Pro stands in its core and memory clock frequencies.

The new Gigabyte MAYA II GV-R9700 PRO is based on the RADEON 9700 Pro VPU. It's currently the fastest card in Gigabyte's MAYA series of graphics accelerators. Gigabyte has kept the design of the card as close to ATI's original offering and it's no surprise that you will find them familiar.