Facelift: The ATi Radeon 9600 XT

Introduction

The Radeon 9600 XT, codenamed RV360, is ATi's latest mainstream card, replacing the Radeon 9600 Pro. Like the Radeon 9800 XT, this card hardly differs from its predecessor. The memory speed, for example, remains unchanged.

The 3D features remain virtually unchanged as well. ATi's design still offers four pixel pipelines and two vertex shaders with a 128Bit memory interface. The Radeon 9600 XT has 128 MB of memory, while a future 256 MB design is planned.

The main new feature is the clock speed of the graphics processor, which at 500 MHz is 100 MHz faster than the 9600 Pro predecessor.

The Z-compression has also seen some improvement. The Hyper-Z III+ optimizations found in all XT cards now works at a compression rate of 24:1 compared to 8:1 on the 9600 Pro. That's all the information ATi has made available, so we can't give you any more details.

Like the other members of the 9600 family, the XT Version of the Radeon 9600 does not require an additional power connector. If the fan looks familiar, that's because it's the same model found on the 9700 Pro.