Conclusion

Well, just like in the previous article called Winter-Spring 2004: Graphics Cards on Top Graphics Processors and Their Low-Cost Versions – Overclocker’s Best Choice, let’s say a few words about each of our today’s testing participants.

ATI RADEON 9600 XT. With disabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering it outperforms its competitors on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra in the majority of benchmarks due to faster DirectX9 pixel shaders performance and higher VPU frequency. But in heavy modes, with enabled FSAA and AF NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra manages to take revenge very often due to higher memory bus bandwidth and aggressive anisotropic filtering optimizations.

The overclocking potential of RADEON 9600 XT based graphics cards may be pretty high, but unfortunately, it is impossible to guarantee that. For instance, a RADEON 9600 XT based graphics cards, which we tested in our previous session worked fine at 625MHz core and 740MHz memory frequency, while our today’s piece managed to show the maximum of 560MHz chip and 680MHz memory.

The most dangerous competitors to RADEON 9600 XT are the cards on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT chips. They are based on fully-fledged NV35 GPUs, use 256bit memory bus and often turn out faster than RADEON 9600 XT even without overclocking. Note that RADEON 9600 XT and GeForce FX 5900 XT cost about the same.

ATI RADEON 9600 PRO. This solution works at a lower chip and memory frequency yielding about 15% of their performance to RADEON 9600 XT. At the same time, they cost about 20%-25% less. If you overclock your RADEON 9600 PRO, you may not be able to reach the working frequencies of the RADEON 9600 XT solution, but it will still remain an attractive purchase in its price range.

ATI RADEON 9600. This solution works at even lower frequencies and falls about 20-25% behind RADEON 9600 PRO. Due to lower clock frequency of the VPU, the RADEON 9600 based graphics cards usually boast very attractive overclocking potential. We managed to overclock our today’s RADEON 9600 sample so that its core frequency exceeded that of RADEON 9600 PRO, though the memory frequency failed to reach that of the PRO version. All in all  the overclocked card pe4rformed really close to what the RADEON 9600 PRO is capable of.

So, it might make sense to buy a RADEON 9600, but only if you intend to overclock it right away. When it works at its nominal frequencies, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 appears faster in most cases, while the price difference between the two is not that big at all.

ATI RADEON 9600 SE. This is a cut-down version of the RADEON 9600, featuring 64bit memory bus. It is about 30-40% slower than RADEON 9600, but also about 30-4-% cheaper. It defeats its direct competitors, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 XT and GeForce FX 5200, in no time, but manages to outperform RADEON 9200 only in case FSAA and AF are enabled. Nevertheless, RADEON 9600 SE seems to be the most optimal solution of all low-cost DirectX9 compatible solutions.