ATI Increases Its Lead: The New Radeon 9700, 9500 PRO and 9500

Test Setup

Theory is a gray area, and what ultimately counts is the performance in practice. ATI sent us a 9500 PRO, which is still at a prototype stage. The final board design is not yet ready, so the chip of the test card runs on a 9700 board, which in turn accesses the memory through a 256-bit bus. Because the 9500 chip can only access memory via 128-bit, the prototype card is equipped with only 64 MB instead of 128 MB memory. The performance of the chip and memory correspond to the card when it reaches the production stage. It's difficult to tell how dramatically the loss in memory will affect the benchmarks, but from experience, the loss to performance will be about 5-10% maximum.

The 9500 PRO prototyp. The board design is not final yet, so ATI put the chip on an R9700 PRO board for now.

Therefore, the benchmarks shown here should be taken with a grain of salt, and should not be viewed as final. No conclusions can be made yet about the 9500 (non-PRO), because we estimate that the loss of 4 pixel pipelines will have very negative consequences on the performance. Unfortunately, a test sample of te 9500 is not available at the moment.