Reviewed by Stuart "Veridian3"
Davidson
Design/Flash/Graphics by Allan "Zardon"
Campbell
Introduction:
Our recent reviews have concentrated on the high end of the Graphics
card market. Today we have the chance to step back into the mainstream
area as we review two Radeon 9600 Pros.
9600 Pro Specifications:
Graphics Technology
* RADEON™ 9600 or RADEON™ 9600 PRO Visual Processing Unit
(VPU)
Memory Configuration
* 128MB of double data rate SDRAM
Display Support
* VGA connector for analog
CRT
* S-video connector for TV / VCR 1
* DVI-I connector for digital flat panel 2
* Independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays
1 Optional S-Video to Composite Adapter available separately from ATI
Online Store.
2 Optional DVI to VGA adapter allows connection to a second VGA monitor.
Available separately from your retailer or the ATI Online Store.
Features
* 4 parallel rendering pipelines
* 2 parallel geometry engines
* 128-bit DDR memory interface
* AGP 8X support
* SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
* Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
* 16 textures per pass
* Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
* Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
* Multiple render target support
* Shadow volume rendering acceleration
* High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
* Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL®
* SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
* 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
* Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
* 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
* Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality)
options
* HYPER Z™ III+
* Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
* Fast Z-Buffer Clear
* TRUFORM™ 2.0
* 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
* Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
* Displacement mapping
* VIDEOSHADER™
* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
* FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
* Noise removal filtering for captured video
* MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
* All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
* YPrPb component output*
* Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
* Dual integrated display controllers
* Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
* Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant)
* Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
* Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!
* PC 2002 compliant
*with optional HDTV adapter available from ATI Online Store
