Introduction

ATI is hitting hard on two fronts this summer. In the high-end segment, the RADEON 9700 is poised to deliver. As the industry’s first true DirectX 9 accelerator, ATI gets bonus points for beating NVIDIA to market. In the value market, ATI is first again with the RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 PRO. These are the first DirectX 8.1 graphics accelerators to be released at such a low price point, as SiS’s Xabre GPU still hasn’t hit retail shelves.

You’re probably wondering what this means to gamers. The answer is simple, with DirectX 8 boards now available at the $100 price point the number of games with DirectX 8-capable graphics will substantially increase. As a result, game developers will feel compelled to release more titles that take advantage of the vertex and pixel shaders present in RADOEN 9000 and any other DirectX 8 video card on the market.

With ATI’s unique positioning in the value space with RADOEN 9000 PRO, what does it compete with? Officially, the answer is NVIDIA’s GeForce4 MX series. The MSRP of the RADEON 9000 PRO matches up very closely with GeForce4 MX 440, while the RADEON 9000’s equivalent would be the GeForce4 MX 420. But in the real world, things are much more complicated than that. NVIDIA has two GeForce4 Ti 4200 variants with street prices that are very competitive with RADEON 9000 PRO. And if that wasn’t enough, making things even more complicated are RADEON 8500 and RADEON 8500LE cards manufactured by ATI and its partners that are also selling within a handful of dollars of the RADEON 9000 PRO. But before we get into those aspects in more detail, lets discuss the roots of the RADEON 9000/RADEON 9000 PRO.

As we discussed in our original RADEON 9000 PRO preview, ATI’s goal with RADEON 9000 was to bring the features present in RADEON 8500 down to a lower price point. But rather than release a stripped RADEON 8500 core (or even an 8500LE with an even lower clock speed), ATI decided to go with an entirely new design. ATI’s goal was to incorporate as many features as possible into the RADEON 9000 while at the same time making it cheaper to manufacture than the RADEON 8500. Lets take a look at exactly what ATI has incorporated into the RADEON 9000 PRO.