![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, July 17, 2002
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro
You have heard the rumors and the speculation. Now see what the Radeon 9000, based on the RV250 Visual Processing Unit, is really all about. You might be surprised with what ATi has done.
Test Setup
AMD Platform |
MSI K7T 266 Pro 2 (VIA KT266A) |
AMD Athlon XP 1800+ |
Coolermaster HHC-001 |
1x Corsair 256MB XMS3000 DDR SDRAM |
3Com 905CX-TXNM 10/100 PCI |
Maxtor 40GB ATA/133 |
Windows XP Professional |
DirectX 8.1 |
VIA 4n1 4.40(a)P3 |
Because this is a video card intended for the mainstream, we wanted to review it on what's becoming a mainstream system nowadays. Our KT266A motherboard with an Athlon XP 1800+ and 256MB represents a good middle of the road platform with enough performance for current games. I used a clean installation of Windows XP with the latest 4n1’s.
Driver version 29.42 WHQL was used for the GeForce4 Ti4200, while the latest ATI Catalyst drivers found on ATI’s site were used for the AIW 8500 128MB video card.
The latest ATI Catalyst drivers on ATI’s site do not work with the Radeon 9000 family, therefore our card was shipped with the latest drivers at the point where they fully supported the R9000 family. The driver packaging version is 7.73 with the core component version of 6.13.10.6102. Here are some pictures of the driver information:
The D3D and OGL panels are exactly like the Catalyst drivers on the web from ATI.
Due to time restraints, we were not able to benchmark compare as many cards as we would have liked to. We had some issues with our GeForce4 MX 460 on our test system and were not able to include benchmarks with that video card, so we picked from our batch we had available and chose video cards which can be had for around the same price as the Radeon 9000 Pro. And, yes, we know the AIW 8500 128MB is definitely not in the price range here. Its performance, however, matches that exactly of a regular Radeon 8500 128MB which can be had for around $150. Its benchmark numbers therefore should be valid.
3DMark2001SE
We're using the latest version 3DMark2001SE build 330 for our testing. We've ran each result with full 32bit color and 32bit textures with no compression. Z-Buffer was set to 24bit on all cards with Double Buffering.
These two pictures here are of the System Info properties within 3DMark2001SE. They give you a pretty good overview of some of the capabilities of the video card you're testing. From here we can see how much local video and texture memory is being used as well as AGP memory. We can also see the vertex and pixel shader versions as well as other hardware capabilities. Our second picture shows us that we're indeed at AGP 4X with Sideband Addressing enabled, but no support for Fast Writes.
We're using 3DMark2001SE as a simple comparison just to get a good idea where the cards fall into place compared to each other with a DX8.1 title. The Radeon 9000 Pro is indeed performing well below the Radeon 8500.
To get an even better look at things, let's take a peek at the details. We're definitely getting the advertised multi-textured 1100 MTexels/s. The Nature test is not performing as well as the Radeon 8500 or GF4 at all, but it still isn't the worse we’ve seen for sure.