VGA Card Buyer's Guide 07/2003

ATi's Current Product Family

Radeon 9200

These cards use the RV280 chip. Like its predecessor, the RV 250 (Radeon 9000), the RV280 is based on the DirectX 8.1 Radeon 8500 design (R200). To create this budget chip, ATi took the R200 and stripped it of two pixel pipelines, two texture units, and a vertex shader. And voilà - the RV280. In contrast to the Radeon 9000, the newer 9200 supports AGP8x and runs at higher clock speeds. It is manufactured with a 0.15µ production process and consists of roughly 36 million transistors.

The RV280's greatest weaknesses are the outdated and slow super sampling FSAA technique and the fact that it is limited to bilinear anisotropic filtering.

Versions:

• Radeon 9200 64/128 MB 128 bit DDR (250/ 400); official price: $99-$129
• Radeon 9200 PRO 128 MB 128 bit DDR (300/ 600); official price: $129-$149