Introduction

With their impressive Radeon 9700 Pro, ATI has already served notice to NVIDIA at the high-end of the 3D card market. This board literally blew off the barn doors with exceptional performance, a super feature set and a price tag to match. Suddenly the 3D landscape shifted, and ATI seems to have the upper hand. Of course, the company that sits atop the high-performance mountain, naturally gains market share with the enthusiast buyer, but a wider product offering is required to have the same effect in lower-priced segments.

The entry-level market is an important one, as a significant portion of profits are made through large OEM deals and ending up as the card of choice for low-cost clone systems. In fact, one of the most popular video cards may still be the GeForce2 MX, although this is rapidly being superceded by the GeForce4 MX. This is where ATI has targeted their Radeon 9000 Pro, positioning it as a fully-featured 3D video option at a value price.

The features part of the equation comes from the Radeon 9000 Pro's DirectX 8 compliant architecture and the fact that NVIDIA's hottest value line (the GeForce4 MX) does not match the Radeon 9000 Pro in this area. This is an important transition not only for potential buyers looking for DirectX 8 entry-level products, but also for hardcore gamers and developers alike. Once the baseline video card includes DirectX 8 pixel and vertex shader units, only then may we start seeing a shift in game development towards truly exploiting these features.

The value component of the ATI Radeon 9000 Pro equation is a double-pronged attack. The retail version we will be reviewing here is a more robust configuration, featuring high-end clock speeds and higher relative performance for the price. The other segment involves extremely low-cost OEM Radeon 9000 Pro cards, which are similar to the OEM Radeon 8500 products, and feature lower core and memory speeds than their retail counterpart.

Both of these product lines are important components of the ATI strategy, with each filling a specific market need at a given price point. This review will cover the higher-end retail Radeon 9000 Pro direct from ATI, and includes not only an outline of its features and architecture, but also a no-holds barred benchmark shoot-out against a wide range of NVIDIA cards, from the GeForce4 MX 440 all the way up to the GeForce4 Ti 4200.