Reviewed by Stuart
"Veridian3"
Davidson
Design/Editor: Allan "Zardon"
Campbell
On the 30th September
ATI announced 2 new products, the Radeon 9800 XT and the 9600 XT. Reviews
of the 9800 XT have been available on the web for since the announcement
however information on the 9600 XT performance has been scarce. Today
we have the opportunity to review the 9600 XT and show you just how
much performance the card has.
SPECIFICATIONS:
* RADEON™ 9600 XT, RADEON™ 9600 PRO, RADEON™ 9600
or RADEON™ 9600 SE Visual Processing Unit (VPU)
* 128MB of double data rate SDRAM
* 4 parallel rendering pipelines
* 2 parallel geometry engines
* 128-bit DDR memory interface (64-bit on RADEON™ 9600 SE)
* AGP 8X support
SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
* Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
* 16 textures per pass
* Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
* Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
* Multiple render target support
* Shadow volume rendering acceleration
* High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
* Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL®
SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
* 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
* Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
* 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
* Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality)
options
HYPER Z™ III+
* Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
* Fast Z-Buffer Clear
TRUFORM™ 2.0
* 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
* Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
* Displacement mapping
VIDEOSHADER™
* Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
* FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
* Noise removal filtering for captured video
* MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
* All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
* YPrPb component output*
* Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
* Dual integrated display controllers
* Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
* Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant)
* Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
* Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!
* PC 2002 compliant
