Awesome, man so much nostalgia even reading "omega drivers". Used to make my X800 an absolute boss along with an X800XT BIOS and a pencil mod to make it all work.
I built my first PC in either late 2002 or earlier 2003. Before that my family always bought pre-builts such as Gateway. The Radeon 9500 was the card I chose for my first custom PC. The ability to unlock it to a 9700 was my primary reason for choosing that card. I knew it was possible to get a card that wouldn't unlock and would have checkerboarding but luckily the Sapphire 9500 I had unlocked just fine. I unlocked mine with the Omega drivers as I was afraid I might brick the card attempting a BIOS replacement. The CPU I had it paired with was an Athlon XP 2800+. My main reason for wanting to upgrade was because I couldn't run Mafia(2002) on high settings. With the 2800+ and the unlocked 9500 Mafia ran on max setting smooth as butter! It looked so much better. Back then there was a huge difference between low and high. It went from looking like an N64 game to looking like a Dreamcast game! Nowadays on a lot of games when you go from low to high or especially medium to high the game looks more or less than same but it runs worse! When you have to look at side by side comparasions to see what
Forgot completely about that :-) , early days ran a ECS K7S5A ATX SIS735 & VOLCANO III HEATSINK/FAN & THERMALTAKE VOLCANO III SOCKET 370 HEATSINK&FAN ECS K7S5A ATX SIS735 SOCKETA AMD DURON 1GHZ SOCKETA OEM
Back in the day I bought a Radeon 9600 Pro. That was in the dial-up modem period so I couldn't search for real good benchmark results online, so had to read reviews in computer magazines. They only tested the Radeon 9500 and 9700, so I assumed the 9600 Pro would be somewhere in between. But....no, the Radeon 9600 Pro in fact was a heck of a lot slower than the 9500 !!! The 9600 only had 128-bit bus (9500 had 256-bit) so that was a real bummer. If I had known the 9500 would have been faster I would have bought that. Omega drivers are realy handy. Ati didn't always had the most stable drivers, lot's of problems with stability and switching to Omega's usualy worked out pretty good, more stable and more features. Also handy for OEM Radeons (in laptops, where the drivers are vendor locked), normal Ati drivers wouldn't work, but Omega drivers did. It saved my Radeon in my Sony laptop as Sony didn't made new drivers, and after SP2 in WinXP the normal drivers didn't work anymore (everything in software rendering....horrible performance).
@@groenevinger3893 I don't know about him, but I used 56k dial-up modem until April/2003 when I got ADSL 320kbps and in my country many people still used 56k modens until around 2005-2007, broadband ADSL/Cable connections aren't available outside the big cities. Nowadays there are thousands of small fiber optics providers spreaded everywhere in the country, lol.
Well the 9600Pro was a lot faster than the generic 9500 non-pro. In 9500 Pro was a great card, just a little slower than a 9700, but didn't have a long shelf life before it was replaced with the 9600Pro as the "mid range" card. I guess ATI realized their mistake offering too much performance for the price when they had a clear lead over Nvidia that generation in DX9.
I remember attempting to bios mod a 9500 into a 9700 back when they were new, sadly my card was a really bad chip, and failed to run for more than a few seconds, i couldnt even flash back because i didnt have a spare pci card lol. Ended up returning it and just buying a non pro 9700. Still have the card in my closet somewhere. Love the 9xxx series. The chimp demo blew my mind the first time i saw it.
This brings back memories, I used to aim buying the L shaped Radeon 9500 but can't find one in stock, the only one the shop have is the 64MB I shaped (they use L shaped but removed 64MB memory) so I waited a bit and buy Radeon 9600XT Bravo, I clocked it so high with resistor voltmod it beat stock Radeon 9700 in 3DMark03. Oh, I don't know if you know this but RivaTuner have softr9x00 patch script to do this as well without the need of Omega driver.
Great video. I had a 9500 Pro at the time and got kinda irritated finding out it couldnt softmod. Fast forward 12 years later I bought a radeon 390 and months later found out it can be unlocked to a 390X. Sure it wasn't a 33% boost like the 9500/9800 unlock, but it was still a pleasant surprise. Also try running the Matrox Parhelia aquarium demo and the nvidia Dawn demo. Both have wrappers and look great on the 9700 series.
PhilsComputerLab that tech demo is so nice! It's a shame I can't run it on my card... 😕 By the way, is there any way to differentiate the 9500 from the 9500 pro by the card itself? I don't know which one I have
Depending on the card, it can be basically impossible as many use the same PCB. Take some photos and post them in our facebook group, we can take a look.
I remember being so happy to soft mod my card, unlocking the potential and saving loads of money. I also voltage modded it a little later and added a custom heat sink and it overclocked massively. Got some scores over 20k in 2001.
Ahh, the memories. There used to be an online store in Gemany that sold "verified" 9500s (meaning they checked whether the card's four dormant render-pipelines were functional and could be activated). IIRC you could either buy a hardmodded version for slightly more money or one that you had to mod yourself through the driver/Riva-Tuner. Basically, that 9500 turned 9700 was a steal back when I ran that card.
Great graphics card, one if not the best graphics card for the money of all time! I had a Geforce 6800LE that also was able to fully unlock. Unlocked + overclocked I almost doubled my score in 3DMark03!
I had a 6800XT and managed to do the same. Was torn between the 6600GT and 6800XT, both were similar in performance and price. Ended up picking the 6800XT and used RivaTuner to unlock it to a full 6800GT the same day, taking my 3Dmark score from 11,000 to 15,000 and Chronicles of Riddick, Doom 3, FEAR etc all ran amazingly well. I go paranoid (even though I saw no artifacts) and ended up re-masking 1/2 of the new shaders just to be safe, and this still left me with a very fast GPU with the knowledge I could always un-mask the other pipes if I ever needed to. Great value.
That ending was awesome... Was that made by or for ATi? It something as a ATi collector, I haven't seen before. It's great that more people are coming into the Retro gaming hobby. There should be a RetroCon ;) Were you can do a Q&A with people like Victor Bart, uxwBill, Wayback Tech, and Cube Computer Channel. Throw a 3 day long LAN Party or 2 machines setup to play some games via Parallel port!
That Animusic demo holds incredibly well even today. It's sad how the Animusic thing devolved into yet another Kickstarter scam. The other Animusic animations from the time would have made for other great tech demos, though.
Wow. To think that just 2.2GP/s & 2.2GT/s per second, on a soft modded Radeon 9500 from back in the day, pretty much the level of Intel integrated graphics today, could still do all THAT at 1600x1200 resolution, not far removed from doing the same at 1920x1080 pixel count wise. Those Radeon prople really knew how to do awesome looking demos even with the limited hardware back then. Makes me wonder how much further my EVGA 750 Ti SC can go when programmed to the max.
Oh, you'd be surprised just how little the extra performance gets you and how lopsided performance increases have been. The radeon 9700 non pro had 20 GB/s of bandwidth; your card has 88 GB/s, that's 4.5 times more bandwidth; very anemic for 11 years of technological progress. The voodoo 1 released just 7 years earlier had 50 times less bandwidth than the 9700 pro (400 MB/s). The radeon 9700 had 8 ROPS at 275 MHz; your 750 ti has 16 ROPS at 1176 MHz. That's a factor of 8.5 increase in the number of pixels you can put out on the screen. It's not that much at all.The reason the pixel fillrate has increased faster than the bandwidth is because of memory saving techniques and an increased use of untextured rendering (e.g. rendering Z-values or calculated values). Again, compared to the voodoo 1 the 9700 pro has 52 times the peak pixel fillrate. When it comes to texture fillrate however, your 750 ti has a lot more TMUs than it has ROPs, where as the 9700 has them in equal amounts. You have 23.5 times more peak texel fillrate. You might not think that makes sense since you can only output 8.5 times more pixels to the screen than the 9700; but there are things such as anisotropic filtering, which requires lots and lots of texture reads cheap. You still might not think that makes sense, because memore bandwidth is only 4.5 times higher, so how do you accomplish 23.5 times more texture reads per second? Anisotropic filtering makes highly coherent texture accesses; you're sampling in an ellipse right near the same texels over and over again, so you're hitting the cache over and over again and don't need to worry about memory bandwidth. The cost is actually down to having to use higher detailed textures (otherwise anisotropic filtering would just be a directional blur; choosing a higher resolution mip map is where the sharpness is comming from); that hits bandwidth a little, but not so bad. That's still not quite as good as the improvement from the Voodoo 1 to the 9700 with 52 times the peak texel fillrate. And here's the real improvement. The 9700 could do 2 billion operations/s; these were vector operations with up to 4 components (unlike modern GPUs) and you could do fused multiply adds which count as two floating point operations. That's a peak of 16 GFLOPs. Ontop of that you have vertex shaders which could crank out 275 MVertices/s, which if I'm not mistaken is 16 multiplications and 12 additions for an additional 8 GFLOPs. That's 24 GFLOPs total peak. Your 750 ti which cranks out 1500 GFLOPs or 62 times the peak output. That's 80 floating point math operations for every pixel that makes it onto the screen that you can do; compared to ~6 on the 9700. What games used to fake with textures in the past, you just throw a few dozen math instructions on it and calculate. It costs too many watts to move bits around when you can just shut up and calculate.
hey, I installed that last demo thinking its just going to be s short little demo of like trees or something but, Its the sweetest demo i have seen come out of a chip manufacturer for a long while, Thanks for playing the entire thing. Unlocking chips have to be the best thing out there, I noticed all the prices are in P,, or should i say the EURO, im glad things for you are not that expensive but something on that site for like 20 euro, for a lonly aussy lol its like $15 more on top of that 20 just to get something. But anyways, Always glad to see your reviews.
Yea there is nothing like that in Australia, I would have tried working with them ages ago. The shipping is pretty good though, here alone you can save quite a bit compared to other shops.
I never knew this. I guess probably because I didn't own a R300 series card until 2013 when I started collecting a few. Back in the early 2000's I went from a Ti4800SE to a 5900 Ultra and then to a 6800XT which I unlocked into a 6800GT. And I never knew about the Omega driver either. But I do have right here a brand new Evil Commando X 9500 128MB with the L shaped VRAM. Was about to list it on eBay with some other cards that I never got around to playing with, until I saw this video. Now I think it's worth a few days one weekend trying this out! If it works, I guess that means I have a brand new Radeon 9700 and can mess around with the smartshaders in some older games and have a whale of a time. Not saying it won't eventually end up on eBay. The deforrestation of my hoarding stores has to continue, it's getting ridiculous. But first - this is something I must try! XD Thanks Phil.
Back in a day had an 9500 pro. All 9550 non pro's were sold out before I had enough money. 9500 pro had only 128bit memory interface vs 256 bit (with unlocking) of non pro variant- At first I used some OC software to OC the card, and after a while when i found stable clocks I downloaded some bios editor and make a copy of my Vbios with ATi flash utility. Then I edited Vbios that I copyed with that bios editor (forgot it's name was a long time ago) then Re-flashed my 9500 pro into a 128 bit variant of 9700 310MHz core / and 600 MHz memory. Everything ran fine 'xept I must turn off machine completely instead of restart, caus restarting gave artefacted image. So it was on/off , avoid restart and it ran fine for rest of it days =)
I had and quite liked a 9500 Pro , it was a great card but just a little flaky , until I flashed it with a 9700 Pro bios. While my card was not one of the 9700 Pro's with disabled pipelines ( sold that way to retain market share due to a shortage in 9500 chips) the card became totally stable .
Had 9800 back in the day. My older brother had the original 9700 pro on a pentium 4; some Dell PC with awful RAMBUS RDRAM; the pipe dream demo was amazing. I don't think he ever built a PC himself. Not sure he even played any games on that machine. I had used a TNT2 M64; dirt cheap OEM card that came with a PIII 600 MHz. I upgraded that with some more RAM and a geforce 4 mx 440; I was almost exclusively playing Half-life mods (the wonderful Natural Selection particularly), so that made a lot of sense. The 9800 non-pro was my first graphics card with shaders at all. Built a pentium 4 northwood during that brief period where the pentium 4 was a better deal than the athlon XP and the athlon 64 wasn't yet widely available. It was an amazing leap in performance. That thing even played Oblivion acceptably. A shame that unmodded Oblivion was so broken (it's not an RPG when you can go everywhere at level 1 and level scaling is so extreme you don't gain any power as you level up).
Epic video! Reminds me of when I was young and my only expense was my PC. I bought an Nvidia FX 5600 AGP and returned it a day later paying the difference to buy a 9700 AGP. Best thing I ever did in 2002. Now 15 years later I use the APU in my AM1 PC... Getting old here.
Reminds me of my good old Sapphire 9800SE AIW Gold. The Gold labeled where almost always guaranteed to unlock to a full 9800 Pro (the silver once did fail quit often to unlock)
I used to have use omega drivers on my old card to play guild wars 1,the official drivers always crashed at the same place,it's why i do not use amd cards now
I had a 9800PRO 128MB card from MSI, I remember that card was only recognized as "Radeon 9800 PRO" if I installed the drivers downloaded from MSI website, if I tried to install the drivers from ATI website that card was shown as "Radeon 9800 XT 128MB" in Windows, but as long as I remember, the clocks are the same as any standard 9800PRO.
actually just before the demo i noticed a slight Issue you starte dto have after the Benchmark, the bottom of teh screen sorta" bounced" for a split second twice.
This reminds me of my first ever 9800 Pro, and how while it had only 128MB of RAM, I was able to find a BIOS mod to get it to identify as a 9800 XT. What's funnier still, was, even when I underclocked it back to 9800 Pro speeds with the XT BIOS, it still was performing faster. So perhaps it did some pipeline unlocking or something similiar. Just a shame that Doom 3 (literally) killed that card... and from there, I had to endure an ongoing RMA cycle through another five or six 9800's which never performed even as well as that first one did at bone stock, let alone allowed me the performance I was spoiled for having.
lol this gpu is so AMD. We can see similarity with the Vega 56 being as fast as the Vega 64 if you undervolt and oc it. Radeon 9700 PRO- Official price: $399 Radeon 9700 - Official price: $299 Radeon 9500 PRO -Official price: $199 Radeon 9500 - Official price: $179
To think, these demos were a show case of what could be done with on the fly computer graphics.... but were not used in games of the time because there wasn't enough performance left on the table to run a game at this level of detail. Fast forward to now.. and in game graphics have far surpassed what even these purpose made demos showcase..... It is so weird to see what was thought up back then, has become kind of ho-hum to video cards these days. Seeing computer games now with better in game graphics than CG movies of this era is freaky as well.
I wrestled with this question. At the moment I'm not doing them as I think it's best to preserve the cards as they are. But if they are cheap and easy to be had, or I have several of them, then for sure. But this soft-mod works just as well and keeps the card in its original form.
As I thought the demo is still available on Archive.org. archive.org/details/ATI9700PipeDreamDemoV1.1 Thanks, Phil. BTW runs great under W10 and prolly under W7 or W8.
No, the Radeon 9550 is based on the RV350 core, while the Radeon 9500/9700 are based on the older R300 core. The Radeon 9550 is basically a further cut down Radeon 9600. It has the same core config of 4:2:4:4, but a much slower core clock (250 vs 375 MHz.) Both the 9550 and the 9600 are slower than the R300 based 9500 it was designed to replace. There was a 9550SE which was even slower due to the memory bus being cut in half to 64 bits. You may try to overclock the core, I had a 9550 which would overclock to 413 MHz and run fine, resulting in a decent performance boost. The memory was far less tolerant so I left that alone.
No idea really. Might be something but I very much doubt you could mod a RX 550 into a RX 570 for example. The cards are just totally different outside of architecture and there's nothing to "unlock".
That is not possible , the gt710 uses the gk208 chip where the 780 uses the gk110 chip . those older video cards would use the same chip for the 9500 and 9700 making this possible
Awesome, man so much nostalgia even reading "omega drivers".
Used to make my X800 an absolute boss along with an X800XT BIOS and a pencil mod to make it all work.
You ran the pipe dream demo! :D
Can I mod my Commodore 64 into a Vega 64?
Nintendo 64 yes Commodore 64 no
I think in a few year you wish you could softmod a Vega 64 into the Commodore
@@danimadrid5454 But if You mod your C64 into N64 first, and then mod it to Vega 64, then it's possible. XD
Old but gold mods ;)
I really like these kind of videos
I had a 9500 Pro. I loved it. Made me buy a 9850XT AIO.
I built my first PC in either late 2002 or earlier 2003. Before that my family always bought pre-builts such as Gateway. The Radeon 9500 was the card I chose for my first custom PC. The ability to unlock it to a 9700 was my primary reason for choosing that card. I knew it was possible to get a card that wouldn't unlock and would have checkerboarding but luckily the Sapphire 9500 I had unlocked just fine. I unlocked mine with the Omega drivers as I was afraid I might brick the card attempting a BIOS replacement. The CPU I had it paired with was an Athlon XP 2800+. My main reason for wanting to upgrade was because I couldn't run Mafia(2002) on high settings. With the 2800+ and the unlocked 9500 Mafia ran on max setting smooth as butter! It looked so much better. Back then there was a huge difference between low and high. It went from looking like an N64 game to looking like a Dreamcast game! Nowadays on a lot of games when you go from low to high or especially medium to high the game looks more or less than same but it runs worse! When you have to look at side by side comparasions to see what
maybe could have gone with a 2500 barton which easily goes to 3200+ speeds with aircooling, no extra voltage! ;)
Hm could do some classic Athlon contact bridging mod videos.
Duron > Athlon Thunderbird
Wow , I had totally forgotten about that !!
Forgot completely about that :-) , early days ran a ECS K7S5A ATX SIS735 & VOLCANO III HEATSINK/FAN & THERMALTAKE VOLCANO III SOCKET 370 HEATSINK&FAN ECS K7S5A ATX SIS735 SOCKETA AMD DURON 1GHZ SOCKETA OEM
Back in the day I bought a Radeon 9600 Pro. That was in the dial-up modem period so I couldn't search for real good benchmark results online, so had to read reviews in computer magazines. They only tested the Radeon 9500 and 9700, so I assumed the 9600 Pro would be somewhere in between. But....no, the Radeon 9600 Pro in fact was a heck of a lot slower than the 9500 !!! The 9600 only had 128-bit bus (9500 had 256-bit) so that was a real bummer. If I had known the 9500 would have been faster I would have bought that. Omega drivers are realy handy. Ati didn't always had the most stable drivers, lot's of problems with stability and switching to Omega's usualy worked out pretty good, more stable and more features. Also handy for OEM Radeons (in laptops, where the drivers are vendor locked), normal Ati drivers wouldn't work, but Omega drivers did. It saved my Radeon in my Sony laptop as Sony didn't made new drivers, and after SP2 in WinXP the normal drivers didn't work anymore (everything in software rendering....horrible performance).
So when the 9600pro came out (2003) you still had a dial up modem?? Where do you life?? LOL :)
@@groenevinger3893 yea i was rocking with pppoe ADSL 128kbps !!
@@groenevinger3893 I don't know about him, but I used 56k dial-up modem until April/2003 when I got ADSL 320kbps and in my country many people still used 56k modens until around 2005-2007, broadband ADSL/Cable connections aren't available outside the big cities. Nowadays there are thousands of small fiber optics providers spreaded everywhere in the country, lol.
Well the 9600Pro was a lot faster than the generic 9500 non-pro. In 9500 Pro was a great card, just a little slower than a 9700, but didn't have a long shelf life before it was replaced with the 9600Pro as the "mid range" card. I guess ATI realized their mistake offering too much performance for the price when they had a clear lead over Nvidia that generation in DX9.
I remember attempting to bios mod a 9500 into a 9700 back when they were new, sadly my card was a really bad chip, and failed to run for more than a few seconds, i couldnt even flash back because i didnt have a spare pci card lol. Ended up returning it and just buying a non pro 9700. Still have the card in my closet somewhere. Love the 9xxx series. The chimp demo blew my mind the first time i saw it.
This brings back memories, I used to aim buying the L shaped Radeon 9500 but can't find one in stock, the only one the shop have is the 64MB I shaped (they use L shaped but removed 64MB memory) so I waited a bit and buy Radeon 9600XT Bravo, I clocked it so high with resistor voltmod it beat stock Radeon 9700 in 3DMark03.
Oh, I don't know if you know this but RivaTuner have softr9x00 patch script to do this as well without the need of Omega driver.
Great video. I had a 9500 Pro at the time and got kinda irritated finding out it couldnt softmod. Fast forward 12 years later I bought a radeon 390 and months later found out it can be unlocked to a 390X. Sure it wasn't a 33% boost like the 9500/9800 unlock, but it was still a pleasant surprise.
Also try running the Matrox Parhelia aquarium demo and the nvidia Dawn demo. Both have wrappers and look great on the 9700 series.
What are the thoughts on these Omega drivers? Do you know about them, did you use them and can you recommend them?
PhilsComputerLab that tech demo is so nice! It's a shame I can't run it on my card... 😕
By the way, is there any way to differentiate the 9500 from the 9500 pro by the card itself? I don't know which one I have
Depending on the card, it can be basically impossible as many use the same PCB. Take some photos and post them in our facebook group, we can take a look.
Official website for omega drivers is gone : www.omegadrivers.net :(
Yea I got them from Guru3D.
I remember doing the 9800SE to PRO softmod. Great value
Awesome video my friend! Really brings me back!
I remember being so happy to soft mod my card, unlocking the potential and saving loads of money. I also voltage modded it a little later and added a custom heat sink and it overclocked massively. Got some scores over 20k in 2001.
I paused it when you were looking at gpu-z and then i loaded up mine just to compare my modern video card to the 9500. :)
Nice :D
its amazing how far video cards have come. it impressive to see then and now side by side!
Ahh, the memories. There used to be an online store in Gemany that sold "verified" 9500s (meaning they checked whether the card's four dormant render-pipelines were functional and could be activated). IIRC you could either buy a hardmodded version for slightly more money or one that you had to mod yourself through the driver/Riva-Tuner. Basically, that 9500 turned 9700 was a steal back when I ran that card.
Great graphics card, one if not the best graphics card for the money of all time!
I had a Geforce 6800LE that also was able to fully unlock. Unlocked + overclocked I almost doubled my score in 3DMark03!
I had a 6800XT and managed to do the same. Was torn between the 6600GT and 6800XT, both were similar in performance and price. Ended up picking the 6800XT and used RivaTuner to unlock it to a full 6800GT the same day, taking my 3Dmark score from 11,000 to 15,000 and Chronicles of Riddick, Doom 3, FEAR etc all ran amazingly well.
I go paranoid (even though I saw no artifacts) and ended up re-masking 1/2 of the new shaders just to be safe, and this still left me with a very fast GPU with the knowledge I could always un-mask the other pipes if I ever needed to.
Great value.
That ending was awesome... Was that made by or for ATi? It something as a ATi collector, I haven't seen before. It's great that more people are coming into the Retro gaming hobby. There should be a RetroCon ;) Were you can do a Q&A with people like Victor Bart, uxwBill, Wayback Tech, and Cube Computer Channel. Throw a 3 day long LAN Party or 2 machines setup to play some games via Parallel port!
2022 and we still need that RetroCon
9600XT was back then a better choice comapred to the 9500 non PRO, but then those Omega Drivers came out and changed the situation :D
That Animusic demo holds incredibly well even today. It's sad how the Animusic thing devolved into yet another Kickstarter scam. The other Animusic animations from the time would have made for other great tech demos, though.
darak2 Can't believe that somebody else remembered Animusic
I'm sure I'm not alone, Pipe Dream is one of the most recognizable GPU demos ever made.
Wow. To think that just 2.2GP/s & 2.2GT/s per second, on a soft modded Radeon 9500 from back in the day, pretty much the level of Intel integrated graphics today, could still do all THAT at 1600x1200 resolution, not far removed from doing the same at 1920x1080 pixel count wise. Those Radeon prople really knew how to do awesome looking demos even with the limited hardware back then. Makes me wonder how much further my EVGA 750 Ti SC can go when programmed to the max.
Oh, you'd be surprised just how little the extra performance gets you and how lopsided performance increases have been.
The radeon 9700 non pro had 20 GB/s of bandwidth; your card has 88 GB/s, that's 4.5 times more bandwidth; very anemic for 11 years of technological progress. The voodoo 1 released just 7 years earlier had 50 times less bandwidth than the 9700 pro (400 MB/s).
The radeon 9700 had 8 ROPS at 275 MHz; your 750 ti has 16 ROPS at 1176 MHz. That's a factor of 8.5 increase in the number of pixels you can put out on the screen. It's not that much at all.The reason the pixel fillrate has increased faster than the bandwidth is because of memory saving techniques and an increased use of untextured rendering (e.g. rendering Z-values or calculated values). Again, compared to the voodoo 1 the 9700 pro has 52 times the peak pixel fillrate.
When it comes to texture fillrate however, your 750 ti has a lot more TMUs than it has ROPs, where as the 9700 has them in equal amounts. You have 23.5 times more peak texel fillrate. You might not think that makes sense since you can only output 8.5 times more pixels to the screen than the 9700; but there are things such as anisotropic filtering, which requires lots and lots of texture reads cheap. You still might not think that makes sense, because memore bandwidth is only 4.5 times higher, so how do you accomplish 23.5 times more texture reads per second? Anisotropic filtering makes highly coherent texture accesses; you're sampling in an ellipse right near the same texels over and over again, so you're hitting the cache over and over again and don't need to worry about memory bandwidth. The cost is actually down to having to use higher detailed textures (otherwise anisotropic filtering would just be a directional blur; choosing a higher resolution mip map is where the sharpness is comming from); that hits bandwidth a little, but not so bad. That's still not quite as good as the improvement from the Voodoo 1 to the 9700 with 52 times the peak texel fillrate.
And here's the real improvement. The 9700 could do 2 billion operations/s; these were vector operations with up to 4 components (unlike modern GPUs) and you could do fused multiply adds which count as two floating point operations. That's a peak of 16 GFLOPs. Ontop of that you have vertex shaders which could crank out 275 MVertices/s, which if I'm not mistaken is 16 multiplications and 12 additions for an additional 8 GFLOPs. That's 24 GFLOPs total peak. Your 750 ti which cranks out 1500 GFLOPs or 62 times the peak output.
That's 80 floating point math operations for every pixel that makes it onto the screen that you can do; compared to ~6 on the 9700. What games used to fake with textures in the past, you just throw a few dozen math instructions on it and calculate. It costs too many watts to move bits around when you can just shut up and calculate.
hey, I installed that last demo thinking its just going to be s short little demo of like trees or something but, Its the sweetest demo i have seen come out of a chip manufacturer for a long while, Thanks for playing the entire thing.
Unlocking chips have to be the best thing out there, I noticed all the prices are in P,, or should i say the EURO, im glad things for you are not that expensive but something on that site for like 20 euro, for a lonly aussy lol its like $15 more on top of that 20 just to get something.
But anyways, Always glad to see your reviews.
Yea there is nothing like that in Australia, I would have tried working with them ages ago. The shipping is pretty good though, here alone you can save quite a bit compared to other shops.
That i can believe. Thanks.
the legendary omega drivers , too bad the guy stopped making them
btw still waiting for a proper 9700 Pro
I never knew this. I guess probably because I didn't own a R300 series card until 2013 when I started collecting a few. Back in the early 2000's I went from a Ti4800SE to a 5900 Ultra and then to a 6800XT which I unlocked into a 6800GT.
And I never knew about the Omega driver either. But I do have right here a brand new Evil Commando X 9500 128MB with the L shaped VRAM. Was about to list it on eBay with some other cards that I never got around to playing with, until I saw this video. Now I think it's worth a few days one weekend trying this out! If it works, I guess that means I have a brand new Radeon 9700 and can mess around with the smartshaders in some older games and have a whale of a time.
Not saying it won't eventually end up on eBay. The deforrestation of my hoarding stores has to continue, it's getting ridiculous. But first - this is something I must try! XD
Thanks Phil.
I miss Windows XP and 7. How psyched I was to own a card with an DVI port haha
Back in a day had an 9500 pro. All 9550 non pro's were sold out before I had enough money. 9500 pro had only 128bit memory interface vs 256 bit (with unlocking) of non pro variant- At first I used some OC software to OC the card, and after a while when i found stable clocks I downloaded some bios editor and make a copy of my Vbios with ATi flash utility. Then I edited Vbios that I copyed with that bios editor (forgot it's name was a long time ago) then Re-flashed my 9500 pro into a 128 bit variant of 9700 310MHz core / and 600 MHz memory. Everything ran fine 'xept I must turn off machine completely instead of restart, caus restarting gave artefacted image. So it was on/off , avoid restart and it ran fine for rest of it days =)
I had and quite liked a 9500 Pro , it was a great card but just a little flaky , until I flashed it with a 9700 Pro bios. While my card was not one of the 9700 Pro's with disabled pipelines ( sold that way to retain market share due to a shortage in 9500 chips) the card became totally stable .
I think the unlocked BIOS came from Kip Hardina (Warp11). 🤔
Had 9800 back in the day. My older brother had the original 9700 pro on a pentium 4; some Dell PC with awful RAMBUS RDRAM; the pipe dream demo was amazing. I don't think he ever built a PC himself. Not sure he even played any games on that machine.
I had used a TNT2 M64; dirt cheap OEM card that came with a PIII 600 MHz. I upgraded that with some more RAM and a geforce 4 mx 440; I was almost exclusively playing Half-life mods (the wonderful Natural Selection particularly), so that made a lot of sense. The 9800 non-pro was my first graphics card with shaders at all. Built a pentium 4 northwood during that brief period where the pentium 4 was a better deal than the athlon XP and the athlon 64 wasn't yet widely available.
It was an amazing leap in performance. That thing even played Oblivion acceptably. A shame that unmodded Oblivion was so broken (it's not an RPG when you can go everywhere at level 1 and level scaling is so extreme you don't gain any power as you level up).
I remember playing this demo alot:D
Had one of those and the mod worked well on my card back then.
Anyone around in Canada during the 90s can see where they pulled their inspiration from with that demo haha.
Epic video! Reminds me of when I was young and my only expense was my PC. I bought an Nvidia FX 5600 AGP and returned it a day later paying the difference to buy a 9700 AGP. Best thing I ever did in 2002. Now 15 years later I use the APU in my AM1 PC... Getting old here.
Paul Roux It's just that stuff advanced so far that low end is fine for many things and high end became more meaningless.
that's a really cool mod
The animusic demo was quite interesting!
Ahh good old days. Imagine if deactivated shader cores were unlockable these days :)
Reminds me of my good old Sapphire 9800SE AIW Gold. The Gold labeled where almost always guaranteed to unlock to a full 9800 Pro (the silver once did fail quit often to unlock)
I used to have use omega drivers on my old card to play guild wars 1,the official drivers always crashed at the same place,it's why i do not use amd cards now
Man, I miss ATI Tray Tools. Sadly it doesn't work with modern cards.
I had a 9800PRO 128MB card from MSI, I remember that card was only recognized as "Radeon 9800 PRO" if I installed the drivers downloaded from MSI website, if I tried to install the drivers from ATI website that card was shown as "Radeon 9800 XT 128MB" in Windows, but as long as I remember, the clocks are the same as any standard 9800PRO.
Hi! Sorry for the question but what type of PCI use the ati radeon 9550? I'm trying to restore an old compaq but it have only x8.
Wow, Where was this softMOD software when I Had a chance to buy such a card back in the days. Those days 3D accelerator was so bad it was so good!
Awesome video Phil! What system did u use for benchmarking this gpu? The one with Athlon 64 4000+ that u built for testing?
Yup that's the one :D
Hi ! Can you please share your driver collection on mega? 🥺🙏
I also made this modification today. It's true that I only have 64Mb. But I plan to use the extra 64mb to turn it into a full 9700.
actually just before the demo i noticed a slight Issue you starte dto have after the Benchmark, the bottom of teh screen sorta" bounced" for a split second twice.
whats the song called, can't find it on shazam :(
Great video, but I do see artifacts on the desktop after you soft modded it - just little lines flicking on the desktop.
Maybe that was just because vsync was turned off?
GadgetUK164 - Retro Gaming Repairs & Mods That's just the capture card glitching.
This reminds me of my first ever 9800 Pro, and how while it had only 128MB of RAM, I was able to find a BIOS mod to get it to identify as a 9800 XT. What's funnier still, was, even when I underclocked it back to 9800 Pro speeds with the XT BIOS, it still was performing faster. So perhaps it did some pipeline unlocking or something similiar.
Just a shame that Doom 3 (literally) killed that card... and from there, I had to endure an ongoing RMA cycle through another five or six 9800's which never performed even as well as that first one did at bone stock, let alone allowed me the performance I was spoiled for having.
This would look like if Linus Tech Tips started to review GPUs and CPUs in the 2000s
Does this Omega drivers work for ATI 9550 256mb card? I can get one for cheap. :)
Riva Tuner could do the unlock too.
There is a resistor which sets the PCI ID. It should be moved to another position. I actually had such a card.
1:52 Ahh old memories.
lol this gpu is so AMD. We can see similarity with the Vega 56 being as fast as the Vega 64 if you undervolt and oc it.
Radeon 9700 PRO- Official price: $399
Radeon 9700 - Official price: $299
Radeon 9500 PRO -Official price: $199
Radeon 9500 - Official price: $179
No, it was ATI branded...
Amd still uses the same team
rallyscoot
AMD = ATI today
Can I mod my ATI hd 5650 to a hd 6950 or any card
XP had such a gorgeous UI 😢
can do with 9550 se?
used to do a similar thing with my Nvidia 6800 XT and Rivatuner
To think, these demos were a show case of what could be done with on the fly computer graphics.... but were not used in games of the time because there wasn't enough performance left on the table to run a game at this level of detail. Fast forward to now.. and in game graphics have far surpassed what even these purpose made demos showcase..... It is so weird to see what was thought up back then, has become kind of ho-hum to video cards these days. Seeing computer games now with better in game graphics than CG movies of this era is freaky as well.
Awesome!
Link for this omega driver pls ?
www.philscomputerlab.com/radeon-9500-to-9700-softmod.html
for a old card like this, its amazing how well it still runs. I have a 9000 pro, do you think i can do something with it?
There is no mod for that card, but you can OC it.
I see i will def try that and see how well it dose
Can I Mode My MSI R9 280X ??
Are you planning on doing some hardware mods anytime soon?
I wrestled with this question. At the moment I'm not doing them as I think it's best to preserve the cards as they are. But if they are cheap and easy to be had, or I have several of them, then for sure. But this soft-mod works just as well and keeps the card in its original form.
As I thought the demo is still available on Archive.org.
archive.org/details/ATI9700PipeDreamDemoV1.1
Thanks, Phil.
BTW runs great under W10 and prolly under W7 or W8.
Phil is going 4K or is it just upscaled 1080p?
Some footage is 1600x1200.
but the camera footage is in 4K?
1080
yeah I thought so it didn't seem quite sharp enough. regardless great video tho, Phil.
9800 SE to 9800 Pro, ah the times..
works with 9500 pro?
TheMega6622 Watch the video...
Would this work with radeon 9550 256 mb ram?
Nope.
No, the Radeon 9550 is based on the RV350 core, while the Radeon 9500/9700 are based on the older R300 core.
The Radeon 9550 is basically a further cut down Radeon 9600. It has the same core config of 4:2:4:4, but a much slower core clock (250 vs 375 MHz.) Both the 9550 and the 9600 are slower than the R300 based 9500 it was designed to replace. There was a 9550SE which was even slower due to the memory bus being cut in half to 64 bits.
You may try to overclock the core, I had a 9550 which would overclock to 413 MHz and run fine, resulting in a decent performance boost. The memory was far less tolerant so I left that alone.
You don't get such value anymore, modding lower end cards into higher end is impossible nowadays.
True. I believe there was one card recently with a BIOS mod. What is the Radeon 460?
No idea really. Might be something but I very much doubt you could mod a RX 550 into a RX 570 for example. The cards are just totally different outside of architecture and there's nothing to "unlock".
GTX950:
Fill rate (single): 31295.0 MTexels/s
Fill rate (multi): 60476.4 MTexels/s
;)
I played far cry 1 with this mod on my 9500 with decent frame rates.
Edited. Actually I don't know the era from year 2004-2015 games. Almost I didn't care and was not interested in games. 😅
can you help me turn my gt 710 to a gtx 790? :P
That is not possible , the gt710 uses the gk208 chip where the 780 uses the gk110 chip . those older video cards would use the same chip for the 9500 and 9700 making this possible
+xFireFist it was a joke lol
get, get a GT 1030... No sli support though
I used to have a GT 710 but now I have a GT 1030 and its massively faster!
I have a GT 1030
I noticed a lot o flickering in the video after you installed the mods.
Modding it into 9800pro was possible...
Fairly recent = 9 years old... i suppose everything is relative tho.
Yea for XP drives they are very new.