Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. today announced the addition of the GV-R9700 PRO graphics board, featuring the RADEON™ 9700 PRO visual processing unit (VPU), to its successful retail lineup. Based on the Ati VGA product, the GV-R9700 PRO will deliver breakneck performance to the gaming and enthusiast market.

The GV-R9700 PRO is the first available graphics accelerators to fully support the AGP 8X standard. The AGP bus provides the crucial high-bandwidth link between the graphics card and the rest of the PC. It carries a variety of different types of data, including 3D models, textures, shaders, drawing commands, and video streams.

The GV-R9700 PRO is also the first graphics processor to be able to render up to eight pixels simultaneously with full floating point precision. This is accomplished by eight parallel 128-bit floating-point rendering pipelines, each with its own independent texture unit and pixel shader engine. The texture unit of each rendering pipeline can sample up to 16 textures in a single rendering pass. These textures can be one-, two-, or three-dimensional, with bilinear, tri-linear, or anisotropic filtering applied depending on the desired quality level.

The GV-R9700 PRO also includes support for TRUFORM™ 2.0, the latest incarnation of ATI's innovative higher order surface technology. It is designed to smooth out the curved surfaces of 3D characters, objects, and terrain by increasing the polygon count through a process called "tessellation". By taking advantage of the massive vertex processing power of the VPU, TRUFORM 2.0 delivers more natural-looking 3D scenes without requiring any changes to existing artwork.

The GV-R9700 PRO is the first product to incorporate SMARTSHADER™ 2.0 technology, ATI's second generation of programmable vertex and pixel shader acceleration. Designed to be much more powerful and flexible than first-generation shader technology, SMARTSHADER 2.0 will for the first time enable the transition of movie-quality effects into real-time games and other interactive applications. As the first complete implementation of Microsoft^® DirectX^® 9.0, the industry standard API for graphics, it will also be fully compatible with current and future revisions of OpenGL^®.

The GV-R9700 PRO advances the state of the art in every aspect of its design. It was created with the goal of not only making today's and tomorrow's games and other 3D applications look better than ever before, but to open up entirely new possibilities for visual entertainment. Gigabyte GV-R9700 PRO is definitely trustworthy in terms of the most complete range of 3D gaming solutions and unparalleled cost-effective performance.

GV-R9700 PRO Spec List