The ATI Radeon 9000 Pro

The actual core used in the Radeon 9000 Pro is the RV250 and at first glance it looks a whole lot like the R200 that powers the Radeon 8500. For the most part, this is true, as both offer quad pixel pipelines, HyperZ II, full DirectX pixel (1.4) and vertex (1.1 shaders, along with the other standard features of the R200.

Where ATI has changed the design is by reducing the number of texture mapping units from two for the R200 to only one for RV250. This in itself shouldn't impact current 3D games, and it might not be until the next-generation of games before anything really pushes this design. The key element in choosing this route is to lower production costs and provide a lower-cost Radeon card that still includes full DirectX 8.x compatibility. This is different than NVIDIA's angle of producing the GeForce4 MX without full DirectX 8.x features, in order to hit a lower price point.

There are a few enhancements to the overall core design, such as FULLSTREAM. This is similar to the technology of the Radeon 9700 Pro, where the unit's pixel shader can be used to smooth over video artifacts from DVD, MPEG or streaming video. The Radeon 9000 Pro has a slightly less robust version of the FULLSTREAM technology, and its use is also inherent on the video-playback program itself supporting this ATI feature.

The ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 64-MB Card

Our Radeon 9000 Pro review card shipped in a higher-end configuration than you will find on an OEM version. This includes a retail heatsink/fan unit (again, similar to the Radeon 8500), 64-MB of 3.3 ns Hynix DDR, along with VGA, DVI and S-Video-out connectors. The clock speeds of the Radeon 9000 Pro also mimic those of the retail Radeon 8500 products, checking in at 275 MHz core and 275 MHz memory.

There are no special features or video options found on this particular board, and even the near-standard Rage Theatre chip is not in attendance. The box contents also mirror this Spartan approach, as only a user manual, a driver CD, a DVI-to-VGA dongle, and an S-Video to Composite adapter share the box with the Radeon 9000 Pro card. This is definitely par for the course with value-priced video cards, but we've become so used to ATI jamming their boxes full of video cables, applications and games, that this was still a bit surprising.