Many were surprised when the first performance numbers for Nvidia's GeForce FX were released in January and ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro still came out on top in the majority of tests. Defying expectations, ATI has become the new performance leader, and it has today announced a new series of products to extend the lead at the high end and make available more-affordable designs that still pack plenty of punch. The Radeon 9800 Pro is naturally the star of the new lineup, as it will be the fastest graphics card available as soon as it's released later this month. Not only should 9700 Pro prices be coming down once the new cards are out, but there's also a new under-$200 DirectX 9 card, the Radeon 9600 Pro, and a $100 DirectX 8 card, the Radeon 9200.

This chimp is the star of ATI's newest tech demo, which shows off some of the possibilities for advanced shaders.

The Radeon 9800 Pro is quite similar to 9700 Pro, but it increases the core speed by 55MHz and uses memory that's 30MHz faster (effectively double that, since it's DDR). ATI points to other enhancements that improve efficiency, but it's the clock speed that accounts for most of the difference. The 9600 Pro is related to the 9500 Pro released late last year, and it should have similarly impressive performance for an affordable card in the $150-to-$200 range. The 9600 Pro has less than half the memory bandwidth than ATI's hot-rod card and half the number of pipelines--but it has a slightly higher clock speed.

The Radeon 9600 Pro's 400MHz core might be surprising, since ATI's had to work to get the 9800 Pro up to 380MHz, but there's a simple explanation: The 9600 Pro is ATI's first .13-micron chip, which means that it uses a denser and cooler format, so it's easier to clock higher. Nvidia saw significant delays with the GeForce FX as a result of moving to the smaller manufacturing process early, but ATI says it had absolutely no problems moving to .13-micron, in part because it made the transition with an established design. And not only is .13-micron helping ATI put out an affordable 400MHz card--a faster core speed than Nvidia's 5600 Ultra, which was also just announced --but it's also sure to be the basis of high-end cards after the 9800 Pro. Some more good news is that all of ATI's new cards fit in a single expansion slot, as compared with the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra's sizeable two-slot footprint.

 

	Radeon 9800 Pro	9700 Pro	9600 Pro	GeForce FX 5800 Ultra	5600 Ultra	5200 Ultra
Core speed	380	325	400	500	350	325
Memory speed	340	310	300	500	350	325
Pixels per clock	8	8	4	8	4	4
Memory path	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory bandwidth	21.8GB/sec	19.8GB/sec	9.6GB/sec	16GB/sec	12GB/sec	10.4GB/sec
Memory type	DDR	DDR	DDR	DDR2	DDR	DDR
DirectX version	9	9	9	9	9	9
Price	$399	$349	$199	$399	$199	$149
Availability	March	Now	April	March	April	April

 
There are a handful of minor enhancements and new features to be found in the new crop of cards, but the new DirectX 9 cards' performance can be compared in a fairly straightforward way. Certainly the new ATI and Nvidia architectures have their specific strengths that lend themselves to one benchmark setting or another, but now that we know what to expect, there are just a few factors determining relative performance: clock speed, memory bandwidth, and the number of pixel and shader pipelines. The chart above spells out exactly how the ATI and Nvidia cards stack up, and it's clear that ATI's top cards derive a serious advantage from their very wide 256-bit path to the memory, which gives them twice the bandwidth of other cards with the same clock speeds. Read on for hands-on performance results.

Next: Bump up the Resolution »