Gigabyte Technology and Power Color have already announced their RADEON 9500 based graphics cards (check this news-story), however, there is still no official information from ATI Technologies itself or any other AIB partners in regards RADEON 9500 and RADEON 9500 PRO. Fortunately, today I have found over CHIP.de computer-magazine the first benchmarks of the newcomers.

The journalists published the benchmarks of the mentioned graphics cards using Pentium 4 2,8GHz, MSI 6398E (i845E), 512MB of PC2100 memory (CAS2), the SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 and IBM DTLA-307030 HDD in 3Dmark 2001SE 330 under default settings. The source of the benchmarks is unknown, though, I assume that ATI itself distributes these results among the partners. Here are the scores they managed to achieve:

RADEON 9700 PRO – 14335
RADEON 9700 – 13236
RADEON 9500 PRO - 11500
GeForce4 Ti4600 – 11131
RADEON 9500 – 10006
GeForce4 Ti4200 – 10392

See the actual graph can be found here.

I remind you the technical specifications of the RADEON 9500 and RADEON 9500 PRO. The RADEON 9500 features 4 rendering pipelines with 1 TMU per each, while the RADEON 9500 PRO provides 8 of them. Both graphics processors support the DirectX 9.0 features and 4 geometry engines. In addition, the new VPUs offer dual 400MHz RAMDACs and all the technologies found on the RADEON 9700 chip, including HyperZ-III, TrueForm 2.0, SmartShader 2.0, SmoothVision 2.0, AGP 8x and so on. RADEON 9500 and RADEON 9500 PRO based graphics cards utilise 128-bit memory bus and are clocked at 275/550MHz for core and DDR SDRAM memory.

As you may notice, RADEON 9500 family of graphics processors is substantially more advanced compared to the GeForce4 Ti in terms of features. As for the performance, based on the 3Dmark2001SE score, we can conclude that the RADEON 9500 PRO is a bit faster than the GeForce4 Ti4600, while RADEON 9500 is a bit slower than the GeForce4 Ti4200. Although such estimates are only partially correct, today we just have what we have. I would stress that RADEON 9500 family manages to show the same or better performance compared to the rivals, having only 4 TMUs or clocked significantly lower. Definitely, the new graphics processors favour from the advanced architecture.

Keeping in mind the relatively low prices on ATI’s new products ($179 for the RADEON 9500 and $219 for the RADEON 9500 PRO), we can expect the company to enjoy great sales this quarter. Nevertheless, NVIDIA still may slash the costs on their GeForce4 Ti family and compete with the rival using more aggressive pricing strategy.