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ATI Radeon 9500 Pro

ATI is continuing to change the video card market place. Today is the launch of ATI’s 9700, 9500 Pro and 9500 VPUs. We take a first hand look at the 9500 Pro and see if it is poised to take the performance mainstream market by storm.

Introduction

For the longest time now it seems NVIDIA has always been ahead of the game, one-upping the competition with being the first to market with specific features on video cards. ATI seemed to be crawling and scratching to get ahead, but always turning up just short of what NVIDIA has brought to the table in the past few years. NVIDIA's GeForce256 was the first to introduce a hardware T&L engine. Their GeForce3 was the first to introduce hardware programmable vertex and pixel shaders in DX8. When the GeForce3 was released, ATI was still behind with their Radeon 64. Right around the GeForce3’s Ti introduction, ATI finally released their top of the line DX8.1 card supporting hardware vertex and pixel shaders, the Radeon 8500. They also released the 7500 which was basically a higher clocked Radeon 64 renamed and repackaged. These two cards were to hold ATI up and keep them in the game. At first the 8500 had a little trouble keeping up with the GF3 Ti 500, but eventually its drivers improved and performance of the 8500 is now on the heels of the GF4 Ti 4200. But with the GeForce4 Ti 4600, NVIDIA still took the VidCard performance crown. Well, times have changed and now we're seeing ATI in a new light.

With the introduction of the Radeon 9700 Pro, ATI is the first to market with a video card that fully supports all DX9 features, beating NVIDIA to the punch. Not only did it bring full feature support of DX9, but it also brought with it the performance to back it up! Sporting a 256-bit memory bus and an eight pipeline architecture among other enhancements, this VPU is the best performing consumer card to date. With the added features of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering to improve image quality, while still maintaining a high level of performance, it's able to actually look great while performing its best. ATI is introducing a lineup of cards today that fill in the current gap between their 9700 Pro and 9000 products. Quite specifically, the 9500 Pro is what is in the spotlight as it is going be their less expensive "high end" card on the market.

The Radeon 9700 Pro is ATI’s ultra high end card priced at around $350 to $399. Today ATI is introducing the Radeon 9700 (non Pro), which will be their high end card priced in the $299 price range. This card directly targets NVIDIA’s GF4 Ti 4600 in the same market segment. Next down the list, ATI is introducing the Radeon 9500 Pro and Radeon 9500 (non Pro) to the performance mainstream market in the $179 to $199 price range. This directly competes against the GF4 Ti 4200 GPU. And last, but certainly not least, are the cards already out there, the Radeon 9000 Pro, 9000, and 8500LE targeting the mainstream market in the $100-$150 range.

Probably one of the greatest things about this lineup is the fact that ATI is bringing DX9 support down to the performance mainstream market so quickly. It seems the 9700 Pro was just released at the ultra high end with DX9 features and already they're bringing it down to a more affordable price! ATI now has a lineup that completely supports DX8.1 in the low end and up to DX9 in the mid to high end.

Specs:

Here is a quick and dirty chart comparing the differences in the four ATI cards.

Radeon 9700 – The VPU and the memory bus are exactly the same as the 9700 Pro. The only difference between a 9700 and a 9700 Pro is a core speed reduction down to 275MHz and a memory speed reduction down to 540MHz.

Radeon 9500 Pro – The Radeon 9500 Pro VPU is exactly the same as the 9700. It's clocked at 275MHz and has the same features as the 9700 and 9700 Pro. The big difference is a reduction to a 128-bit memory bus operating at 540MHz. At 128-bits wide, the memory bandwidth is reduced to 8.8GB/sec at 540MHz.

Radeon 9500 – This one has a major VPU change. It has been reduced from 8 pixel pipelines to 4 pixel pipelines. The core runs at 275MHz on a 128-bit memory bus at 540MHz. Basically it's the 9500 Pro but with only 4 pipelines.

To make it even simpler, it turns out looking like this: 9700 Pro is the top of the line, the 9700 has lower core and memory speeds, the 9500 Pro reduces the memory bus to 128-bits, and the 9500 goes even further by reducing the pipelines down to 4. Each step down reduces something to meet the price point and market segment they fall into.

The 9500 Pro:

Today we have the 9500 Pro in a very non-retail form to show you.

What exactly is non-retail form? Well, to put it simply, this is not the card you will be buying in stores. This is simply an ATi 9700 Pro that has been clocked down and had one of the memory channels removed. That means that we also have only 64MB of memory. The retail card from ATi will have 128MB, so this card should pull up a bit short in some of our benchmarks compared to performance the retail model will exhibit.

We have been assured by ATi that this card is a very good representation of the retail product in terms of performance, just remember it will not look exactly the same and of course have more Ram.

Because of what we mentioned above, the memory that this card has on it will probably not be what the final retail version has. The memory on our board is 2.8ns BGA. At a stock 540MHz though, it doesn't need to be that fast. To save costs they will most likely use a higher nanosecond rating RAM. Our card has the standard VGA, TV-Out, and DVI adapter.