This chip is presented by Hercules 3D Prophet 9000 Pro 64MB, AGP card.
Features:
- ATI RADEON 9000 chip, 275 MHz clock rate;
- 64MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Samsung 3.6 ns chips, 275 (550) MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
- Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1100 megapixels/sec and 1100 megatexels/sec.
Overclocks to 310/620 MHz.
In July 2002 ATI made two anouncements: one about R300-based High-End solution (RADEON 9700), another - about the mainstream RV250-based RADEON 9000.
It's not a secret that below $100 mainstream market is the most popular, bringing highest revenues. Through years NVIDIA continues its right marketing policy, releasing impressive product lines that include both cheap, and High-End solutions (like GeForce4 Ti). Last fall ATI has also presented users a selection of RADEON 7500 (mainstream) and 8500 (High-End). Besides, there were many older RADEON 7000/7200 in the market. This approach along with the new partnerships with some makers enabled the Canadian company to press American NVIDIA. However, RADEON 7500 was just an overclocked RADEON with dual-monitor support. It took a considerable price cut to enable these cards to gain popularity (considering the previous negative image of ATI as a company that releases bad drivers). At that the pressure from NVIDIA was very intense, strengthened by mainstream GeForce4 MX. Now we see GeForce4 Ti 4200 prices dropping deeper and deeper in its fight with the previous ATI High-End solution - RADEON 8500.
However, NVIDIA made a big mistake, paired down GeForce4 MX to the level of an overclocked GeForce2 without any DirectX 8.1 support. First of all, now there are games using shader technologies, unsupported by GeForce4 MX, so the release of RV250 may knockdown GeForce4 MX, as ATI introduces shaders to the below $100 cards! It means that game developers will at last create games, fully utilizing shaders (especially pixel shaders), for the expanded DirectX 8.1 card market. And the increasing number of such games may become a death sentence to GeForce4 MX.
We are bound to compliment ATI for this solution. And if the number of shader games increases abruptly, we will have to thank Canadians for this. Of course, NVIDIA won't stay in a hole and may slow ATI progress by a new Ti 4200 price cut. But now these are only guesses.
I believe our readers have already understood that RV250 (RADEON 9000) is the replacement for RV200 (RADEON 7500). I.e. RADEON 9000 is not meant to replace RADEON 8500! However, last information about RADEON 8500 discontinuance prejudices aforesaid along with the policy correctness in general. Though if R300 is used in cards for RADEON 8500 market segment ($150-220), everything will be OK.
Theoretical and analytical videocard reviews, containing functional analysis of NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti GPU: ATI RADEON 9000
On the 10th of August 2002 the latest drivers from ATI are 6.102, 6.107, 6.118 for Windows XP.
I shall note there's
Radeon2.ru web-site that tracks all software novelties from ATI and offers improved drivers versions with preset registry settings for increasing RADEON cards perfomance.
Cards' performance is in the summary diagrams.
Taking into account that RADEON 9000 has all DX81 features that are supported by RADEON 8500 (except TrueForm, disabled in drivers), we won't pause on shaders in detail, as they are described in the RADEON 8500 section.
Below are screenshots from a number of games taken on RADEON 9000, and the reference screenshots taken on NVIDIA GeForce3.
