May I ask specifically what you didn't like about the image quality of the ati 9700 pro or what features you thought it should have?
sure.
the pixel shaders were only partial precision which means that there was less accuracy so they were certainly less able to emulate old features with high accuracy if the old fixed functions had been calculated in 32 bits (although things like the dreamcast's modifier volumes werent 32 bits at every step; the T&L was calculated with 32 bit float precision on the dreamcast's CPU although the R300 vertex shaders were as good there). it would've been better for it to have a 32 bit fixed point log z-buffer (UT 99 had to have depth hacks or severe flicker without it and so we haven't seen many games that look quite like enter the matrix since geforce FX or even Xbox Classic; even the DX10 renderer for the original unreal engine-based games uses a reverse float 32 bit z-buffer and that still isnt quite as good as th) and a D24FS8 format. few attempts for new features were made at openGL. made no attempt at dev relations like nvidia did so opengl drivers wound up sucking as a result for R300. it did have z-bias, but that could only be done at 24 bit if you wanted per pixel (rather than per vertex which was used by most games then and done in full precision with vertex shaders) since the z-buffer and pixel shaders were only 24 bit. full trilinear filtering wasn't possible on the R300 and amd's filtering still wasnt up to snuff with the 6k series; havent tried GCN though. and finally, R300's depth range still appeared smaller than it did on the Gf 4k Ti series with games that both used 24 bit z-buffers. R300 was geared for performance to the max like the gamecube's flipper was (they were designed by the same team IIRC) with everything low precision (remember all the artifacts in REMake that were required in order to get cool looking alpha blending effects?).
ati also had some overgammad colors mixed in with overvibrant colors.
there were plenty of rendering errors in max payne, at least with the drivers and settings i tried (perhaps forcing things through the drivers caused them i dont remember; i was also always at a loss to understand why they had the option for 6x MSAA given how terrible it looked and when the sampling pattern for 2x and 4x MSAA was really the only thing R300 did right image quality wise).
amd's alpha blending or testing whatever it was looked pretty terrible particularly in the windows in max payne.
basically, i would make hardware with 64 bit float (and fixed as what is best depends on the app) data precision at every stage of the pipeline; all decompression should be lossless; and of course less than 64 bit instruction sets are out of date, so 64 bit instruction sets are necessary too. and larrabee failed because it wasnt radically parallel. it even used multiple pentium 1 cores... it simply combined all the old ideas into one and that's not going to work. you can get a lot more performance out of software and a lot better IQ out of software, although you cant have a balance of both like you do with modern hardware unless you use more than one gen purp die, some can be geared towards being better for gaming, and any noticeable problems should be taken care of with multiple dies (AFR sucks for example).
i am happy for amd though and i wish them nothing but the very best. i just think that sega's programmers made burning rangers look really good for its day (at the tech level in addition to the art level) with all the software transparency and creative use of the hardware functions it did have; as did PS2 games like Devil May Cry 1 and 3 (wouldnt have looked anywhere near as good on the gamecube unless the whole game was done in software at which point it would've been unplayable although re4 on the PS2 had terrible textures and i heard the fight with krauser wasnt the same because the ps2 didnt have as much geom processing power as the GC's fixed function T&L unit did). the saturn port of DOA arcade looked better than the new one made for the PSX. astal's water effects looked damn fine and the game's art style was cool if a bit depressing (game was a bit hard though). vf2 played and sounded just like the arcade one. panzer dragoon saga wouldnt have looked the same on the PS2. the 3D level in sonic jam looked really good and so did the unique user interface.
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