LOSTCIRCUITS

ATI RADEON 9600XT

Despite its lower performance and price point, the new RADEON 9600XT appears actually the more exciting product. Manufactured by TSMC, the RV360 core is the first GPU or VPU utilizing what ATI calls a Low k Enhanced VPU. Low k stands for a low dielectric constant process that has been in the spotlight lately under the name SOI, short for Silicon-On-Insulator. SOI means that the substrate itself is a strong insulator which allows to route traces together much more closely and, more importantly, "seals" the interconnects, thus preventing loss of signal. Consequently, lower signal strength is required, which, in turn, reflects in lower power demands and heat dissipation. Secondary power input is not necessary in the case of the Radeon 9600 XT series.

RV360 Specs At One Glance

With respect to the innards, the RV360 core only features 4 pipelines and two vertex engines but it makes up for the lower number of execution units by running at a whopping 500 MHz core frequency. Like all current ATI products, the RV360 core offers full support for pixel shader 2.0 output, needless to say that the engine features floating point precision floating point 3D-texturing units. The 24x Z-compression conserves massive amounts of memory bendwidth.

Like the R360, the RV360 supports higher order surfaces and multiple rendering targets. With respect to AntiAliasing and anisotropic filtering (AF), the RV360 supports up to 6xAA and 16xAF.

ATI has released some internal comparison benchmarks for the RADEON 9600 compared to the nVidia GeForce 5600 Ultra, however, we were not able to find out the Detonator driver revisions used for the comparion, likewise, some other vital information was missing and, therefore, we don't feel compelled by those charts. Rather, we will reserve some performance analysis for a later point.

New Drivers

Within the November Timeframe, ATI will release new Catalyst drivers including the new "Overdrive" function, which is essentially a tool for dynamic overclocking. That is, instead of using a fixed core / memory clock, the frequencies can be adjusted to enable the highest performance without running the risk of crashing. We certainly look forward to this feature, it will make benchmarking a lot more, er, reproducible - or not? Maybe this will finally signify the point in time where we can abandon quantitative measurements of performance in the benchmarks and only concentrate on the quality.

All in all, at a projected price point of $199 for the RADEON 9600 XT and $ 499 for the RADEON 9800 XT, the 9800 XT will be the show and tell solution whereas the 9600 XT is supposed to wrestle another big chunk of market share from the various competitors. It will be very interesting to watch the developments of the graphics sector over the next few months with VIA and the Delta-Chrome re-entering the graphics sector and the XGI Volari V5 and V8 lurking in the background.

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