ATi Radeon 9600XT - spodesabode.com archive

Highest Practical Resolution

If your monitor refreshes at 85hz, that means that it only shows 85 frames per second, and so even if your graphics card can do 200 FPS, you wont notice the slightest bit of difference. In fact, to avoid shearing, you are recommended to turn VSync on anyway.

Because of this, I feel that FPS alone are not any measure of a graphics cards worth. Instead, I am going to push the card to the highest res it will go to, whilst still maintaining reasonable performance. For this test, I will be setting 6000 to 7000 3d Marks as the threshold of decent playability.

The low end system managed 1600 by 1200 with 32bit colour, scoring 6845 3dmarks.

The high end system also managed 1600 by 1200 with 32bit colour, scoring 7258 3dmarks.

There would seem to be a bottleneck of some kind here, probably the restrictions of the memory bandwidth. However, 1600 by 1200 is as high as most 19" monitors will go, so I think this demonstrates that the Radeon 9600 XT is a competent performer, no matter what your preferred screen resolution.

The Radeon 9600 XT is aimed to be at around £150 and offers excellent value for this. Unless you are absolutely dying to get DirectX 9 support, this isn't any reason to throw out your older Radeon 8500 (for instance). If on the other hand you haven't upgraded in a while, it could be just the job. The 9600 XT will be in all the shops in plenty of time for Christmas.

After much thought and discussion, I decided I should add a short addition to the end of this review to explain it. This card is a mid-range graphics card aimed at the occasional gamer. As such, we made the review short and to the point, of whether it was worth buying. We did not go into a lot of technical detail, as we don't believe people who are in the market for this card, are that interested in the technicalities, but rather if it's worth buying. If they are, there are many other sites that cater for them.

As far as only using 3dMark as a benchmark, this was not our intention, but due to UPS' failings, we were given the card with around 2 hours to review before the NDA was lifted. This was not enough time to benchmark thoroughly enough and certainly not enough time to draw strong conclusions. But we felt 3dmark gave us a rough enough estimate of where it's performance lied.

What we can suggest is waiting for our next graphics cards round up (ready for Christmas shoppers), which will include this card, more benchmarks and a stronger conclusion.