Review: ATI Radeon 9600 Pro

Let's kick off with a stock run.

Ignoring the Radeon 9700 Pro for the time being, the 9600 Pro struggles to keep up with its newly speed boosted rival which has a rough 1700 point lead. Remember the FX5600 Ultra sports the uprated 400MHz core and 400MHz memory clocks compared with its earlier 350/350 clocked incarnation. Given that NVIDIA uprated the clocks precisely to take on 9500 Pro and 9600 Pro, we have to say it succeeded in this test. But that's not the whole story, what happens when we enable 4x anti aliasing and 8 sample anisotropic filtering.

FX5600 Ultra mk2 maintains a ~1500 point lead with 9700 Pro some way ahead. We'll discuss this a bit more at the bottom of the page. What about a further boost to 1600x1200, keeping the same AA and AF settings?

The lead for FX5600 Ultra drops to ~1200 points but a lead it still is. Amazingly, 9700 Pro manages to stay above the 6000 point threshold. Long term Hexus readers will know that back in the days of GeForce3 and GeForce4 MX, we remarked that above 6000 points from a card doing the stock benchmark at 1024x768 with no AA or AF was good performance. Getting that here at 1600x1200 and with AA and AF applied is good going, despite XP3200+ and nForce2 under the hood.

The performance drop graph should sum things up nicely.

9700 Pro suffers the least from enabling 4xAA and 8xAF with only a 35% drop in performance, with a further 43% drop from the increase in resolution. Not bad baseline figures. 9600 Pro fares less well with a near halving of performance with a IQ options and then the resolution increase really taking a big hit. FX5600 Ultra fares better, but can't keep up with 9700 Pro, with 40%+ drops at each stage. Not too bad from a DX8 class test if you ask me, given the settings we enable.

Onto the next benchmark and another 4 graphs.