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Introduction:

The Radeon 9600 Pro has been on the market for a few months already but its performance has been theoretically hindered when running on third party chipset-based platforms. Due to compatibility issues, the Radeon 9600 Pro cards were downgraded from AGP 8X to 4X. Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. decided to delay the launch of its Radeon 9600 Pro card, the GV-R96P128D, to fix this problem. The GV-R96P128D is the first and only Radeon 9600 Pro based graphics accelerator that supports the full range of Intel and AMD processor based platforms. This includes the latest Intel 875PE and 865G/P/PE, nVIDIA nForce2/nForce2 Ultra400, VIA KT400/KT600 and SiS 648/648FX/655 chipset based motherboards.

Based on the RV350 GPU, this graphics card features 128MB DDR SDRAM memory on a 128-bit DDR memory interface, 400/600MHz core/memory clock speeds, 4 pixel pipelines, and dual integrated display controllers. It comes with 15-pin VGA, S-video or composite, and DVI-I connectors. Smartshader 2.1, Smoothvision 2.1, and HyperZ III+ technology support.

Consumers will notice that the R300 Radeon 9500 graphics card is becoming more scarce in the market these days. The R9600 replaces the R9500 in ATI's product line. ATi was never able to turn much of a profit with the Radeon 9500 due to the fact that it had the same amount of transistors as the high-end models, weighing in at a hefty 107 million transistors. That is a staggering amount for a mid-range chip. Compared to 63 million transistors of a GF4 Ti 4200, that makes the 9500 a very expensive chip.

The newer Radeon 9600/ 9600 PRO remedies this situation. Unlike the Radeon 9500 Pro, the RV350 chip has only four pixel pipelines compared to the 9500’s eight pixel pipelines. Another big difference between the 9600 Pro and 9500 Pro is the number of vertex shader units has been reduced from four to two. This brings the chip's transistor count down to a very workable 75 million transistors. Combine with its 0.13µ production process, the production cost for the chip is now down to the regions of its direct rival, the GeForce FX 5600 with roughly 80 million transistors.

Although the R9600 has only half as many pixel pipes as the R9500, it has an engine clock that's 45% faster. The resulting loss of fill rate is cushioned by the increased clock speed. The R9600 does trail the R9500 by about 27% in terms of fill rate but as you'll see from the performance numbers, the R9600 holds its own versus its slightly older sibling.

The card:

According to Gigabyte's site, the GV-R96P128D is packaged with a detailed manual, V-Tuner software for overclocking, and Power DVD XP software - no games are listed but our package came with Bungie Software's Oni and Serious Sam (the First Encounter) by Croteam. We've complained before about how old the Gigabyte bundled games were before, and we reiterate that here - while good games at their time of release, these games simply do NOT do the card justice.

The R96P Bundle

The following charts details the specifications and shows the differences between the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro and other cards in the mid-entry level graphics card: