Perhaps as a result of nVidia's dominance of the graphics card market throughout the year, there has been a lot of speculation and anticipation over ATI's new high-end card, the Radeon 9700. A number of very positive reviews were recently posted, including articles at Beyond3D, Tom's Hardware, and AnandTech, which give detailed technical information about the card as well as a number of benchmarks with various games.

While all tests were run on PCs, the Mac version of the Radeon 9700 is planned to be released later in the year. Due to the board's increased complexity, ATI needs time to update the Mac drivers to work in OS X. Here's a clip from the Beyond3D conclusion:

I think we can say that is certainly has been interesting seeing what ATI has in store for us, for what started with Radeon and started to show a little more with Radeon 8500 really has pushed to the fore with Radeon 9700. The performance of the board is reasonably staggering in some cases in comparison to their previous generation and they have done this whilst introducing the most complex and feature rich chip on the market place today.

Radeon 9700 Review at Beyond3D

AnandTech: ATI Radeon 9700 Pro - Delivering as Promised

Tom's Hardware: ATI Radeon 9700 PRO

ATI (add to watch list)

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