ATI has also updated their TRUEFORM technology to 2.0. This basically uses tessellation (arranging geometric shapes in a pattern - a technique analogous to anti-aliasing) to smooth out curved surfaces. A great example would be the arm joints of game characters, and with SMOOTHVISION activated, these appear more fluid and with less sharp edges. What TRUEFORM 2.0 offers is additional tessellation options, with continuous and adaptive tessellation added to the fixed format of version 1.0. Also being added to the mix is displacement mapping, which is sort of an enhanced and more powerful version of bump mapping, with more control over 3D surfaces. This is a common function of 3D video generation programs (like Renderman) and points again to the ATI goal of providing movie-like 3D images.
One of the glaring issues ATI had with their Radeon 8500 was SMOOTHVISION and its reliance on super-sampling techniques. This up-sampling of pixel/image data did produce a high quality image, but the additional bandwidth and processing incurred took its toll on framerates, not to mention erecting resolution limits at higher SMOOTHVISION settings. ATI had a real challenge with their initial SMOOTHVISION implementation, and looks to have smoothed over the rough edges with their new 2.0 version.
This all starts in the Radeon 9700 core, which now includes a dedicated SMOOTHVISION 2.0 Anti-Aliasing Unit. This is coupled with the advances made with HyperZ III, as well as other bandwidth-saving mechanisms. Anisotropic Filtering has also been improved with this new version, and uses an adaptive algorithm supporting 2, 4, 8, or 16 texture samples per pixel, with either bilinear or trilinear samples.
While it is impossible to determine overall framerates without testing the actual hardware, this is certainly a step in the right direction. Strangely, SMOOTHVISION 2.0 supports both super-sample and multi-sample anti-aliasing modes, which we hope is for customer choice and not reliance on super-sampling. In speaking with ATI, this did not seem to be the case, and the performance levels look to be very high with multi-sampling enabled.
In addition to high-end 3D power, ATI hasn't neglected the other parts of the video game, and has enhanced the Radeon 9700 with VIDEOSHADER technology and upgraded the color depth to 10-bit per color channel. VIDEOSHADER essentially lets the Radeon 9700 use its programmable pixel shaders when dealing with more conventional video playback.
Streaming video is one area ATI is excited about, and VIDEOSHADER can smooth over video artifacts and yield a much cleaner image. This is also true of DVD movies or any form of video playback (even TV), and it also provides real-time noise filtering on captured video, along with the ability to apply real-time effects such as blurring.
The ATI RADEON 9700 also supports a new, high precision 10-bit per color channel format, this is quite similar to the Gigacolor Technology found on the Matrox Parhelia. This lets the Radeon 9700 use over one billion colors, which should be useful for graphics professionals.
