The ATi Radeon card uses Flip-Chip technology which has only just been adopted by nVidia in their new Geforce FX cards. Both the ti4600 and Radeon still use the .15micron process with a 256bit architecture. They also both run at similar clock speeds, 325mhz for ATi and 300mhz for nVidia. The difference between these cards that lets the Radeon shine is the RAM.

Both cards use DDR1 ram, running at 310mhz(620) on the Radeon and 325mhz(650mhz) in nVidia's case. The difference is that ATi use a 256bit pipeline unlike the ti4600's 128bit pipeline. This means theoretically almost DOUBLE the bandwidth is available to the Radeon.

The Radeon is also the first card to be fully DirectX 9 compatible sporting Pixel and Vertex Shaders also used in the Mobility Radeon 9000. And just starting to come into play with the new 8x AGP boards, is of course - AGP 8x compatibility.

So it would seem the Radeon has a lot going for it, but how does it stand up in the benchmarks?

For the testing I used:

MSI K7D-Master
ONE AMD Athlon XP 1800+
512mb DDR CAS 2 memory
Windows XP SP1
nVidia 40.41 Drivers
ATi Catalyst 2.3 Drivers

This represents a pretty average system today.

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