Date:
Thursday , October 24, 2002
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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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.

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Test Setup:

Gigabyte 8IHXP, P4 2.53GHz, 512MB Kingston PC1066 RDRAM, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, 3Com 3C905C-TXNM, Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 8.1b, Intel Chipset INF 4.04.1007

ATI cards were tested with driver version Catalyst 2.4 Packaging Version 7.78 version 6193 and the Ti 4600 was tested with driver version 40.72. The ATI cards were tested with anisotropic filtering at the Quality AF setting of 16x where noted. The GF4 Ti 4600 was tested at its max of 8X anisotropic filtering using the NVIDIA control panel.

9500 Pro Setup:

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Setup was just like any other ATI card. I setup the card on a clean install of Windows XP. It detected the card and I loaded up the CD and went on installing the drivers. The CD shipped with our card contained the beta 6193 driver set with included control panel. The drivers detect the card as a 9700/9500 Series card right now. As we stated previously, the 9500 Pro VPU supports every 3D feature of the 9700 Pro. Above you can see what 3DMark2001SE detected about the 3D features. If you want to see the OpenGL extensions and DX Caps exposed right now, you can look here. They are exactly the same as the 9700 Pro. When DirectX 9 is released with DX9 drivers from ATI further DX caps will be revealed.

3DMark2001SE

We're using the latest version of 3DMark2001SE (build 330) for our testing. We ran each test at default 3DMark2001SE settings in the benchmark.

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Using 3DMark2001SE as a quick reference for performance differences, note that the 9500 Pro does come in under the GeForce4 Ti 4600 total performance. But at the same time, the numbers are not far apart. There's only a 1000 or so 3DMark difference between the 9500 Pro and GF4 Ti 4600. Comparing the 9500 Pro to the 9700, there's around a 3000 3DMark difference on average. Still keep in mind that this benchmark is not utilizing AA or AF.

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When we enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is when we really see the 9500 Pro shine compared to the Ti 4600. The 9500 Pro is able to score about 1000 3DMarks higher with AA and AF compared to the Ti 4600 with the same settings. Comparing the 9500 Pro to the 9700 Pro it loses almost 3000 3DMarks at 4X AA and 8X AF. I would think everyone would still consider this a respectable score for a $200 video card.