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ATI RADEON 9500 PRO Review November 27, 2002 Brandon Bell |
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Summary: As of today, ATI's GeForce4 Ti 4200 killer (the RADEON 9500 PRO) is ready for public consumption. However, not only is the RADEON 9500 PRO more than a match for the Ti 4200, it's also capable of outperforming NVIDIA's flagship GeForce4 Ti 4600 in some situations! If you're in the market for a new video card, you'll definitely want to check out today's review!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 17 ) |
Earlier this summer ATI’s RADEON 9000 series stole the show in the value segment, besting NVIDIA’s GeForce4 MX line. While RADEON 9000 PRO wasn’t the first DirectX 8 accelerator to sell near the $100 price point (that honor falls to the SiS Xabre 400) as ATI claims, it was the first to offer the right combination of features, performance, compatibility, and visual quality to dethrone GeForce4 MX. The Xabre 400 got off to a shaky start largely due to its drivers. Game compatibility issues were present that were eventually solved, but they had left a sour feeling in the minds of many consumers. Distribution was also a problem here in North America.In any case, while RADEON 9000 has been busy serving the budget-minded consumers, RADEON 9700 PRO has been an even bigger success for ATI. Practically every gamer and hardware enthusiast in the know is aware that ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO is the new king of the hill in the 3D market, NVIDIA’s GeForce4 doesn’t even come close. However, with its $399 price tag, the RADEON 9700 PRO’s cost is simply out of the reach of most consumers. You can purchase a 2GHz-class processor, motherboard, and memory for the same price as one RADEON 9700 PRO – which do you think is the better value?
Because of this, NVIDIA has been largely unaffected by the release of the RADEON 9700 PRO up to this point. Sure, they’re no longer considered the market leader from a technology standpoint, but in terms of market share NVIDIA is still on top, they actually gained a few percentage points over ATI last quarter. But now ATI plans to change the status quo, as their RADEON 9500 line is aimed squarely at NVIDIA’s bread-and-butter product: the GeForce4 Ti 4200.
9500 versus 9500 PRO
In particular, two variants of RADEON 9500 are available, the RADEON 9500 and RADEON 9500 PRO, so keep this in mind when shopping for a 9500 card. The key difference between RADEON 9500 and RADEON 9500 PRO lies in the number of pixel pipelines supported. RADEON 9500 PRO contains eight pixel pipelines, while RADEON 9500 is limited to four. As a result, the fill rate of RADEON 9500 is half that of RADEON 9500 PRO, sapping performance.ATI will rely solely on its board partners to produce RADEON 9500 cards, while it focuses on RADEON 9500 PRO cards like the one we’re reviewing today. Third party manufacturers will also be producing RADEON 9500 PRO boards of their own, which means we should see some aggressive pricing on RADEON 9500 PRO cards once they become readily available.
SIDEBAR: As of today, the RADEON 9500 PRO is now shipping to retailers.
| Specifications | Page:: ( 2 / 17 ) |
The RADEON 9500 family is based on the same R300 core as the RADEON 9700/RADEON 9700 PRO. This means that you’ll be getting the same floating-point precision present in the RADEON 9700 line. With RADEON 9500 PRO, ATI is essentially bringing DirectX 9 compliance to the mainstream market, and bringing an incredible amount of performance with it.
Like the RADEON 9700 (non-PRO), the RADEON 9500 PRO boasts a 275MHz core clock speed that is paired with 128MB of 270MHz DDR memory (effectively 540MHz). Unlike RADEON 9700 however, the RADEON 9500 PRO features a 128-bit memory interface, half the size of the 256-bit interface present on the RADEON 9700 line. This cuts memory bandwidth to 8.8GB/sec, the same figure as NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4400.
Lets take a look at the rest of the RADEON 9500 PRO’s specs:
The List
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO Visual Processing Unit with 275MHz engine clock
Microsoft DirectX 9.0 and the latest OpenGL functionality
8 parallel rendering pipelines
128-bit floating-point color precision
4 parallel geometry engines
128-bit DDR memory interface
128MB DDR memory at 540MHz
SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology
SMOOTHVISION 2.0 technology
HYPERZ III technology
TRUFORM 2.0 technology
VIDEOSHADER engine
FULLSTREAM technology
AGP 8X support
DVD video playback
Dual monitor support
DVI-I (Digital flat panel support)
Video output
S-Video/Composite connector for TV/VCR
Three-year warranty
Notes
With its eight-pixel pipeline architecture and 275MHz core clock frequency, RADEON 9500 completely outclasses its closest competitor (NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4200) on paper, and in some cases is even superior to GeForce4 Ti 4600. For instance, RADEON 9500 PRO boasts twice the fill rate of GeForce4 Ti 4200, but just over three times the anti-aliased fill rate of Ti 4200. In fact, RADEON 9500 PRO’s anti-aliased fill rate of 13.2 billion AA samples/sec is nearly twice that of GeForce4 Ti 4600’s 4.8 billion AA samples/sec.
We’ll see if RADEON 9500 PRO has enough memory bandwidth to outperform GeForce4 Ti 4600 in anti-aliased situations a little later in this article, but certainly the core itself is up to the task.
SIDEBAR: ATI still dons its cards in the company’s color: red.
| The RADEON 9500 PRO card | Page:: ( 3 / 17 ) |
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New board design
As you can see the RADEON 9500 PRO board design is different than RADEON 9700 PRO. The card still requires an external power source, but the location of the power connector has been shifted towards the center of the board, just above the VPU. The memory is located just behind it.
The heat spreader that was located on the back of RADEON 9700 cards’ is no longer present and the memory chips are no longer oriented perpendicular to each other.
What’s really surprising by this design is how remarkably it contrasts with the regular RADEON 9500 cards. While the RADEON 9500 PRO is based on a new board design, the RADEON 9500 cards we’ve received have been built entirely on the original RADEON 9700 board!
We’re guessing that the third party manufacturers have decided to do this to save time. With the pressure of getting product out to market in time for the holiday shopping season, card manufacturers must have chosen to forego the time involved in coming up with a new design in favor of getting their RADEON 9500 products to market as quickly as possible. Essentially, they’ve slapped the RADEON 9500 on a RADEON 9700 PCB to save time.
As a result, we’ve had RADEON 9500 cards since the beginning of this month (although we’ve noticed that they’re still rather limited at retail), while the RADEON 9500 PRO card we’re reviewing today hasn’t even been in our possession for a full week. In fact, looking at the date of manufacture of our RADEON 9500 PRO card, this little red gem is just shy of three weeks old!
Overclocking
While we normally prefer to include overclocked results in our product reviews, we were unable to perform this function with PowerStrip with the RADEON 9500 PRO. Even armed with version 3.29, the software refused to properly recognize the clock speeds of the hardware. However, we were told during Comdex that these RADEON 9500 PRO boards are incredible overclockers.
Normally we’d take these statements with a grain of salt, but based on our experiences with the RADEON 9700 PRO we don’t doubt it. Since this card is essentially built on the same core, we have a feeling that we’re sitting on a wealth of overclocking potential with our RADEON 9500 PRO card. As soon as we’re able to overclock our board, we’ll report back with our findings in a separate article.
Compatibility
While Chris was able to run tests with his Gigabyte GV-R9500/ASUS P4S8X combo in yesterday’s article, I didn’t have the same results with my RADEON 9500 card from Sapphire or the ATI RADEON 9500 PRO. The same symptoms we reported on involving the RADEON 9700 and the SiS 648 chipset persisted, namely system stability was inconsistent, especially in Unreal Tournament 2003 and/or during high-resolution gaming. Owners of SiS 648-based motherboards should keep this in mind for the time being, fortunately the 845PE chipset from Intel works flawlessly with all of ATI’s products.
The KT400 chipset also has performance issues in OpenGL titles with the R300 core that allows the KT333 to outperform KT400 at low resolutions by about 8%. VIA is currently working to address this issue.
SIDEBAR: Sapphire actually manufactures the boards for ATI, in much the same way VisionTek performed the same task for NVIDIA.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 4 / 17 ) |
System Setup
Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz
ASUS P4PE
512MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR333 SDRAM
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO @ 275/540
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO
Sapphire Technology RADEON 9500 Atlantis – 128MB
Driver version 6.13.10.6200c (Catalyst 2.4)
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 reference
Visiontek Xtasy Ti 4400
ASUS V9280S (NV28) @ 250/513MHz
Detonator version 40.72
30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
Benchmarks
3D Mark 2001 Second Edition Build 330 – 32-bit color
Quake III: Arena version 1.17
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
Unreal Tournament 2003
Comanche 4
SIDEBAR: Our 9500 PRO board was Rev. 08
| 3D Mark 2001 | Page:: ( 5 / 17 ) |
3DMark 2001 - DirectX 8
SIDEBAR: A lot of the second generation RADEON 9700 PRO boards will be using their own designs, many of them will also ship overclocked.
| Serious Sam 2 | Page:: ( 6 / 17 ) |
Serious Sam 2 - OpenGL
SIDEBAR: ATI actually manufactured a lot of the early RADEON 9700 PRO boards for the third-party manufacturers.
| Quake III | Page:: ( 7 / 17 ) |
Quake III - High Quality
SIDEBAR: ATI switched to Hynix memory modules for our RADEON 9500 PRO card.
| Comanche 4 | Page:: ( 8 / 17 ) |
Comanche 4 demo
SIDEBAR: The Sapphire RADEON 9500 board also features Hynix memory.
| Unreal Tournament 2003 | Page:: ( 9 / 17 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch
SIDEBAR: We’re using the final copy of UT 2003 for this test, not the demo.
| 2x Anti-Aliasing | Page:: ( 10 / 17 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
SIDEBAR: ATI recently released newer Catalyst 2.4 drivers. We’re wondering if they were timed to spoil the GeForce FX launch during Comdex. Perhaps ATI didn’t realize NVIDIA was paper-launching GeForce FX when they released the drivers?
| 4x Anti-Aliasing | Page:: ( 11 / 17 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
SIDEBAR: We’re still not sure why RADEON 9500 cards haven’t hit Price Watch. We saw quite a few RADEON 9500 boards during Comdex, and everyone stated that their board was ready for production.
| 2x Anisotropic filtering | Page:: ( 12 / 17 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
SIDEBAR: ATI includes a composite and S-Video cable, S-Video-to-Composite adapter, DVI-to-VGA adapther, and power cable connector in the RADEON 9500 PRO packaging.
| 8x Anisotropic filtering | Page:: ( 13 / 17 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
SIDEBAR: And don’t forget ATI’s trade-up program – trade in your old graphics card for a shiny new 9500 PRO!
| 4x AA/8x Aniso | Page:: ( 14 / 17 ) |
Quake III – High Quality
SIDEBAR: We’re still scratching our heads at the lack of RADEON 9700 cards on the market. At $299, we’d love to see those boards hit the retail sector. Just think how quickly the prices would fall!
| UT w/ AA & Aniso | Page:: ( 15 / 17 ) |
Unreal Tournament 2003 - flyby
Unreal Tournament 2003 - botmatch
SIDEBAR: Shuttle was handing out some nice pens with laser pointers on the end - Nice!
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 16 / 17 ) |
Pros
Performance: While it may not boast the 325MHz core/310MHz memory clocks of its bigger brother the RADEON 9700 PRO, the eight-pixel pipeline architecture and 275MHz core clock are still more than enough for the RADEON 9500 PRO to outperform its closest competitor in the mainstream segment, the GeForce4 Ti 4200. In fact, in some cases the RADEON 9500 PRO is even able to outperform GeForce4 Ti 4600.
Basically, the only product that is going to outclass the RADEON 9500 PRO this Christmas also comes from ATI in the form of the RADEON 9700 or RADEON 9700 PRO.
Visual Quality: ATI’s SMOOTHVISION 2.0 technology is the most advanced implementation to date. For anisotropic filtering, up to 16 samples are supported, as are settings for bilinear (for speed) or trilinear samples (for better image quality) depending on the end user’s preference.
ATI’s anti-aliasing implementation in SMOOTHVISION 2.0 is also improved over its predecessor. Previously anti-aliasing came at a huge hit to performance, but now thanks to ATI’s use of multi-sampling, performance is greatly improved.
In terms of 2D visual quality, the RADEON 9500 PRO continues to deliver high quality output. Those of you with larger monitors will definitely see the difference between RADEON 9500 PRO and some of the earlier GeForce cards that were produced by third tier manufacturers.
Price: ATI is officially listing the RADEON 9500 PRO at $220 with a $20 mail-in rebate, brining the price to $200. This is a little bit higher than GeForce4 Ti 4200, but once you consider the added performance and features you’re getting, a case can easily be argued for the RADEON 9500 PRO.
In addition, as third party manufacturers get their RADEON 9500 PRO products on the market and availability increases, prices will fall dramatically, especially online. For instance, the RADEON 9700 PRO is still listed at $400 officially, but online prices are currently as low as $310. In a matter of months we wouldn’t be surprised to see RADEON 9500 PRO cards selling for as little as $150.
Cons
Compatibility: The compatibility issues with the SiS 648 chipset still irk us a bit, we were hoping ATI had addressed this issue by now. Fortunately SiS is hard at work on a new revision of the SiS 648 chipset with Hyper-Threading support. Hopefully they’re also working with ATI on resolving the issues with the R300 core.
Of course, this is no consolation to the consumers who already own a motherboard based on this chipset.
SIDEBAR: ATI recently slashed prices on the RADEON 8500LE. They’re now officially priced as low as $79!
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 17 / 17 ) |
FiringSquad says:
Looking over everything ATI has brought to the table with the RADEON 9500 PRO, it’s hard not to give this card our Editor’s Choice Award. In terms of performance, the numbers don’t lie. ATI has brought a new level of power to the $200 price point. Even NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Ti 4600 can’t keep up with the RADEON 9500 PRO in many cases!
On top of its incredible performance, the feature set of RADEON 9500 PRO is just as impressive. You’ve got full DirectX 9 compliance and 128-bit color support, 8-pixel pipelines for 16 textures per pass, and AGP 8X. Okay, so we’re reaching a bit with that last feature, but still, the RADEON 9500 PRO is loaded to the max with features. The only aspect the RADEON 9500 PRO is missing is the RADEON 9700’s 256-bit memory interface, and if you want that you’ll have to pay $100 more for it in the form of the RADEON 9700. As we said in the Ballistics Report, the only cards better than the RADEON 9500 PRO at this point would have to be the RADEON 9700 or RADEON 9700 PRO. NVIDIA’s GeForce4 Titanium line just can’t match what ATI is offering at this point.
Now that ATI has completed the RADEON 9500 PRO, their biggest challenge is going to be meeting demand. Just as the GeForce4 Ti 4200 was an instant success for NVIDIA, we have a feeling that the RADEON 9500 PRO will be a smash hit for ATI. If they can supply cards to the retail sector and their manufacturing partners in time for the holiday sales rush ATI could have a very merry Christmas this year. Meanwhile NVIDIA has got to lower the price point of its products or be forced to sit on the sidelines until its GeForce FX and other products based on the NV3x architecture make their debut next year.
SIDEBAR: Are you putting the RADEON 9500 PRO on your wish list this Christmas or will you be upgrading to RADEON 9700 PRO? Chat with others in the news comments!