THG Graphics Card Buyer's Guide

Older Radeon Models

Radeon 9200

The RV 280 (Radeon 9200), like its predecessor the RV 250 (Radeon 9000), is based on the DirectX 8.1 design of the Radeon 8500 (R 200). Compared to the Radeon 8500 with its 4x2 pipe design, this chip only features half as many texture units per pixel pipeline (4x1) and only one vertex shader unit. The main differences between the Radeon 9000 and the 9200 are the newer part's higher clock speeds, and its support for the AGP 8x interface. It is produced on a 0.15µ process and contains roughly 32 million transistors.

The greatest weaknesses of the Radeon 9200 are its outdated and slow super sampling FSAA implementation, as well as it being limited to bilinear filtering.

Versions:

  • Radeon 9200 SE - 64/128 MB - 64-/128 bit DDR - 200/330 MHz
  • Radeon 9200 - 64/128 MB - 64-/128 bit DDR - 250/400 MHz
  • Radeon 9200 PRO - 128 MB - 128 Bit DDR - 300/600 MHz

Radeon 9600

The Radeon 9600, which has the internal designation RV350, is the successor to the highly successful DirectX 9 chip RV300 (Radeon 9500). The RV300 only differed from the "big" R300 (Radeon 9700) in that it featured a memory bus that was pared down from 256 bits to 128 bits. In the standard version of the chip, ATI also disabled four of the eight pixel pipelines. Nonetheless, it was the exact same chip as the R300; its approximately 107 million transistors made it expensive to produce as a mainstream part. In the newer RV350, ATI didn't just disable some of the pixel pipes through the card's BIOS, but physically reduced the number to four in the chip design. Combined with a die-shrink to a 0.13µ process, this made the 75-million transistor chip much cheaper to produce.

The Radeon 9600's advantage over its predecessor lies in its much higher clock speeds, which usually outweighs the disadvantages incurred by the reduction in the number of pixel pipelines. Despite this, the Radeon 9600 Pro is sometimes outperformed by the Radeon 9500 Pro in fill-rate intensive applications. Other than that, the 9600 offers DirectX 9, modern multi-sampling and fast anisotropic filtering - in short, everything that the flagship products have.

The Radeon 9600XT (codename RV360) takes a special place in this line-up, though, as it is based on a more modern architecture than the earlier 9600 variants. For the first time, this makes driver optimizations for trilinear filtering possible, which results in much higher performance.

Versions:

  • Radeon 9600 XT - 128/256 MB - 128 bit - 500/600 MHz
  • Radeon 9600 Pro - 128/256 MB - 128 Bit - 400/600 MHz
  • Radeon 9600 - 64/128/256 MB - 128 Bit - 325/400 MHz
  • Radeon 9600SE - 64/128 MB - 64/128 bit - 325/365 MHz

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