ATI Delivers: The Radeon 9500 PRO

Test Setup

We compared the Radeon 9500 PRO with ATI's brand new range and with the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4600 and Ti4200-8x. To stretch the cards to their limits, we ran our tests using a powerful 3.06 GHz Pentium 4. If you are interested in how the cards perform with a slower CPU (2.2 GHz), take a look at the preview article that we published four weeks ago.

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Hardware
Processor Intel Pentium 4 3.06 GHz
Memory 2 x 256 MB, PC333 cl2
Graphic Cards NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 128 MBNVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600ATI Radeon 9000 ProATI Radeon 9500 ProATI Radeon 9700ATI Radeon 9700 PRO
Motherboard ASUS P4PE
Drivers & Software
Graphics Driver NVIDIA - v. 40.72 WHQLATI - v. 02.4 (6.13.10.6200)
DirectX Version 8.1
OS Windows XP Professional SP1
Benchmarks & Settings
Aquanox Retail Version v1.17
Max Payne Retail Version v1.05Benchmark using 'Shooting Alex'
Unreal Tournament Demo v1.1
2003 Demo Antalus Benchmark
3D Mark 2001 SE Pro Version, Build 330

Benchmarks

Aquanox

The reduced memory bandwidth is quite noticeable in Aquanox. In 1280x1024, the 9500 PRO was 46% slower than the 9700 PRO and only marginally ahead of the Ti 4200-8x. The GeForce 4 Ti 4600 was a good 10 - 15% faster in all resolutions.