Just a day after the RADEON 9500 based graphics cards appeared for sale, ATI Technologies announced that the elder brethren of the unit, the RADEON 9500 PRO, is now shipping to retailers and add-in-board partners worldwide. Based on the highly acclaimed RADEON 9700 PRO visual processing unit (VPU), the RADEON 9500 PRO brings many high-end features, including DirectX 9.0 support, to the performance mainstream market.

RADEON 9500 PRO incorporates 8 rendering pipelines, 4 geometry engines, 275/540MHz clock speed, dual 400MHz RAMDACs, 128-bit memory architecture and AGP 8x interface. The VPU supports all the DirectX 9.0 base features and provides all the technologies first implemented in the RADEON 9700 VPU.

ATI Technologies has made several changes to the design of the RADEON 9500 PRO graphics card and even developed a special driver version for the newcomer. Thanks to the positive changes, the RADEON 9500 PRO with estimated retail price of $199 leaves no chances for the $299 GeForce4 Ti4600 even in terms of performance, not talking about price : performance ratio, according to AnandTech, whose preview is available here.

Provided that ATI and its AIB partners are really able to fulfil the demand on the RADEON 9500 PRO based graphics cards this holiday season, sales of Nvidia based graphics cards will be impacted very significantly.

PS. Although ATI declares 128-bit memory bus for the RADEON 9500 PRO, they utilise 8 memory chips with 4Mx32 (8x32=256-bit) organisation from Hynix. Nevertheless, the peak memory bandwidth of the RADEON 9500 PRO is still 8.64GB/s.