Got no money ?

[Wij]

I you're looking for a good performing mainstream card then apparently the 9500 Pro is the best best by far.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1797

By the way it's a GeForce FX 5600/5200 review

Anyone seen a 9500 Pro card for less than £139 ?

 

[Embattle]

So far only £144

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/ki.asp?action=info&p=29009&t=278&l=2&AvdID=1&CatID=24&GrpID=1&s=pl

TBH in less than one month it will drop with the proper release of the 9800

 

[Wij]

Can somebody lend a any spare megapixels they have ?

 

[Jonty]

Hello

Just can't stay away I believe MicroDirect have a Sapphire or Power Colour 9500Pro for £136.30, but there's something daft like £8 for delivery. Other than that, Blisware and The Overclocking Store are probably your best bets.

But as Embattle says, wait! The 9600 and 9800 will be released fairly soon. If you want the extra performance, then pick up a 9600 Pro (the mobile version handles itself very well, so I can only imagine what the desktop version is like). Or, of course, wait but a week or two and the prices of the 9500 Pro should drop. I would, however, advise against purchasing a 9500 non-Pro. For the little you're saving, it's not worth losing out on the performance stakes.

Kind Regards

 

[Wij]

I know the 9500 << 9500 Pro. The 9600 has fewer pipelines than the 9500 Pro though and considering that the 9200 is generally worse than the 9000 I don't hold out immense hope for the 9600 atm.

 

[Jonty]

I believe the 9600 Pro has 4 rendering pipelines, just like the 9500 Pro, right (forgetting about what may or may not be physically on the board)? And you have to remember that the 9600 Pro will be manufactured on a 0.13 micron level design, rather than the 0.15 design of the 9500 Pro. Furthermore, the 9600 Pro (I think) also support ATi's most silly DX9.0++ specification, unlike the 9500 Pro. The 9600, or so I have bee led to believe, is the successor of the 9500 in terms of power and performance.

As for the 9200, I believe that's effectively a 8500 rebadged with AGP 8x support. ATi updated the numbering system because it outpowered the original 9000 card they produced. ATi, like nVidia, are keen to have their product numbering reflecting raw power and features. The higher the number, the happier you will be

Kind Regards

Jonty

Edit - My mistake, the 9500 Pro does have more pipelines, but to be frank, I'd still be surprised if it could outpower the 9600 Pro which has effectively been designed from scratch, rathering than being a restricted version of a higher design like the 9500 Pro ... I guess only the specs will tell

 

[Wij]

I think you'll also find that the 9000 tends to outperform the 9200

 

[Jonty]

Really? Oh well, that's what I get for being an nVidia fan boy Seriously, though, specifications alone can be misleading. The GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is a perfect example. This card, on paper, should be astoundingly powerful, and even blow away the Radeon 9800 Pro. Yet, just because of one seemingly insignficant feature (the fact it has a 128-bit memory interface, instead of a 256-bit as per the NV35 (which is supposed to be already tapped out ) and the 9700/9800 Pro) it was barely able to keep up with the cards it was supposed to compete with.

Guess you can rarely tell

Kind Regards

 

[Xavier]

Right, I'm back after a hard week CeBITting, so before I get buried in a pile of post-show follow up I thought I'd iron this one out

The Radeon 8500 became the 9100 and is quicker than both the 9000 and 9200 (which is a 9000 with 8X AGP, hence being R280)

Radeons 9500, 9500 Pro, 9700 and 9700 Pro are all the same chip, albeit with different bios and a couple of resistors moved around. ATI really dropped their trousers on price and went in as aggressively as possible on the first two boards, so much so that they're losing money selling the GPU to partners, which is why their .13 chip the RV350 has arrived ahead of schedule. Hercules have already pulled their 9500's from manufacture. Sapphire it's worth noting won't have a 9600 Pro at first.

The 9600 isn't as quick as the 9500 Pro, or NV31U but it's much more cost effective than either of the R300 derivatives which will mean you'll see it for around the same price initially, hopefully with many cards around the £120 mark by June. ATI have just requested a stop on reviews of the 9600 too, as they're revising clock speeds again.

The mobile chips are looking pretty good, but as Chris Hook, ATI's Marketing Manager from Canada told us at the launch the 8x32 memories needed for the top spec mobile part won't be in manufacture til June in any quantity, so it doesn't exist just yet.

A few of you might have spotted the discussion on rage3d.com, it's getting pretty interesting... Norbert Kuperjans, the Technical Marketing Manager from ATI Europe gave a briefing on R350 which broke down to the following:

On a silicon level, R350 and R300 are technically identical, the only physical differences between the chips is that ATI cleaned parts up to increase yield, to hit the target 380Mhz.

The F-Buffer is a driver feature per-se, which is why ATI can claim OpenGL2 compliance now, and if OpenGL2 changes at all in the leadup to the ARB finalising it then they can make the necessary adjustments through CATALYST. What they're actually doing is partitioning a little of the GPUs on-die cache to store shader programs and their result, rather than pushing it across the frame buffer. In most cases this means zip for normal applications, but bear in mind that with marginally less cache for other stuff, the chip can hit its cache limit quicker for other operations which can mean it appears slower than the 9700 Pro (seen in a few reviews online already, albeit in extreme circumstances)

The other part, the 256Mb DDR-II board is also an interesting one, remember that being the same GPU as the R300 features-wise ATI didn't bolt on the 22M or so transistors needed for DDR-II support. Like the DDR-II demo ATI gave late last year the memories are DDR-II packages being run in DDR-I mode. Planning to release the 256Mb card at the same speeds as the 128Mb the 256Mb will be marginally slower than its predecessor becase of the latency introduced transposing memory states, where the 256Mb will pull forwards is in tests which use a total frame buffer which exceeds 128Mb.

There's already a couple of crude software hacks to turn your R300's into R350's, it should take a week or so before the more sophisticated video bios solutions become available.