by Anton Shilov
07/19/2004 | 11:22 PM
ATI Technologies has quietly unveiled its RADEON 9250 graphics processing unit aiming at the very low-end of the market. The novelty sports DirectX 8.1 capabilities and its main peculiarity is the lowest cost possible, but not exceptional performance.
<%BANNER[article]%>The RADEON 9250 is based on the RADEON 9200 architecture with 4 rendering pipelines, 1 vertex shader engine along with built-in RAMDAC, TMDS and TV-Out controller. ATI’s original DirectX 8.1 micro-architecture was first unveiled in 2001 with the RADEON 8500 and then adopted for various needs, including low-cost products.
The difference between the RADEON 9200 and RADEON 9250 graphics chips seems to be slightly lower core-clock of the latter along with some more flexible PCB design guidelines allowing add-in-cards makers to act depending on their vision of the market and needs of their customers.
An ATI’s spokesperson did not immediately returned enquiry for comments.