In October ATI revealed 2 new cards in its lineup; the new stud on the block, the Radeon 9800 XT, and the new mid-range Radeon 9600 XT. Today we take a look at ATI's midrange solution and see how it fares against the nVidia's midrange 5600 Ultra.

The Radeon 9600 XT takes dead aim at the mainstream market, in other words, what the general Joe out there can afford (or the general Joe's parents / significant other at Christmas time) to shell out. The 9600XT is being positioned as the replacement to the 9600 Pro.

At the heart of the 9600 XT is a 0.13 micron RV360 VPU, this is a similar core to the RV350 (9600Pro) but with a twist, they utilized a Low K dielectric process. This process allows for reduction in capacitance, therefore reduction in power required. All this together allowed ATI to juice up the clock cycle on an otherwise unchanged core, and keep the temps low. The other side benefit to this process was allowing the Radeon 9600 XT, as its 9600 Pro brethren, to not require an external power source, unlike it's Nvidia counterparts. The 9600 XT comes in 128MB and 256MB flavors, though we will be testing the 128MB variety.

You can grab a look at the full specifications and features but they have not changed since the Radeon 9600 Pro, except for the core and memory clocks.

As you can see the difference between the 9600 Pro and 9600 XT cooler (even the FIC 9600 Pro reviewed here) is fairly drastic, even though ATI reduced the temperature of the core and this should bode well for overclockability. ATI is even bundling their own overclocking utility, called OverDrive, but we will talk about that later. The cooling solution is not only adequate for controlling the GPU temperature it is a nice looking addition with very little added noise (actually no noticeable noise increase in my test system, but it has 6 fans blowing, so unless you strap a 747 to it you are not going to hear it). You may also notice the difference in how busy the 9600 Pro is compared to the 9600 XT in the above picture, this is due in part to the Low K Dielectric process. I count at least 4 less capacitors on the top of the board.

The sample ATI sent me is a Non-Qualification sample (which basically means I don't get Half Life 2 with it :p ), it should represent the performance you will attain if you purchase the retail 128MB version. The 9600 XT has the standard SVGA / DVI and TV out connectors on the back, I can not tell you if they will package any additional software, other than Half Life 2, as mine included none.

Let's take a look at the differences between the 9600 XT and its Pro brethren, as well as the nVidia FX 5600 Ultra, just for grins.

*The NV31 has 4 pipelines in certain situations, although primarily it is a 2 pipeline card.

On paper we can see why the 5600 Ultra and 9600 Pro are close competitors; will the advancements brought to the table by ATI in the 9600 XT be enough to separate it from the pack? Only time, and some testing will tell :)

Before I pull out my Chaintech FX-71 I must perform a few tasks. First up is to benchmark Call of Duty so I can compare against the 9600 XT. The 2nd step will be to download the latest Catalyst drivers from ATI, this would be the rumored HOT Catalyst 3.8's.

After downloading and putting what is needed on my 2nd Hard Drive, I format the main HD and reinstall using an Unattended Slipstreamed Windows XP image, which includes several of the programs I need for testing as well as SP1 and Pre-SP2 hotfixes from good ole MS.

After the fresh XP reload I install the Catalyst 3.8 drivers. Once installed I connect the temperature probe to the VPU; I want to make sure I don't overheat it with these drivers. The VPU never even reaches 36C during normal operation, when they say cooler they mean cooler. Another nice feature included with the Catalyst 3.8 drivers, is VPU Recover. This allows the VPU to recover from a crash that you would otherwise have to reboot from, at least that is what the tab says it does.

Time to begin the testing phase. Our test bed is an Intel P4 2.4C, 1GB OCZ PC3200 on an ABIT IC7 motherboard. The ATI Radeon 9600 XT used Catalyst 3.8 Drivers and the Chaintech FX-71 used the Nvidia Detonator 53.03's.

Test Software will be:

Unreal Tournament 2003
Halo
Splinter Cell
Max Payne 2
Call Of Duty

The comparison video card will be the Chaintech 5600 Ultra I reviewed before which is aimed at the same segment of the market, although it has been superceded by the newer 5700 Ultra chipset. We'll also be covering image quality and overclocking. was used to measure in-game performance where applicable.

For those of you who don't know, there are a lot of problems with high levels of AA and some Direct 3D games, which happens to be the majority of those tested today. We'll present some games where we didn't experience abnormalities, but in many cases, 6xAA was faster than 4xAA, which cannot be, but was the case during benchmarks.

Unreal Tournament 2003

For UT 2003 we use Test on maps Antilus and Inferno. This will automatically configure and run the system through its test, hopefully leaving Human Error behind.

Antalus - 1024x768, Maximum Quality

Antalus - 1280x1048, Maximum Quality

The only thing that can be said here is that the 9600 XT runs UT2003 flawlessly at High Quality 1024x768 or 1280x1024 screen resolution. The demo, as well as playing the game, is smooth with no noticeable hiccups or stutters. When comparing the results of the benchmarks we can see that on Antalus, there is a significant difference between the 9600 XT and the 5600 Ultra, it is even more evident on Inferno.

Inferno - 1024x768, Maximum Quality

Antalus - 1280x1024, Maximum Quality

Turning on AA and AF drives home that point, a 10% difference in performance on Antalus without AA or AF turns into a near 25% difference with 2xAA and 8xAF. Anything beyond 2xAA / 8xAF becomes a little to much for the cards to handle, although, the 9600 XT makes a good run at it. As I have stated before, if you are going to tweak your image so you can run at 6xAA / 8xAF, you are tweaking away what you are trying to gain, best to leave it off or at 2xAA / 8xAF, the image is quite stunning at that level.

Halo

Halo is a fairly new with some very intense graphics, this should be a good test of what a current card needs to be at today as well as a look into what the card may hold for future games. Halo has yet to fix it's AA so we will not be testing that phase of it. It is unfortunate that the only test we have is the imbedded timedemo which has no actual gameplay to show.

Halo @ 1024x768 w/Timedemo

From this benchmark you can see that the cards are fairly evenly matched, lets take into real game play and see how it goes. For this we are going to use FRAPS and run / look around the initial control room once while looking up and down, not an exact science, but should show us a better level of comparison between the cards.

Halo @ 1024x768 w/Fraps

Both cards are run @ 1024x768, you can see they are evenly matched here with a slight edge going to the 9600 XT, not enough to warrant a clear winner stamp however.

Splinter Cell

So now we try to kill our video cards, Splinter Cell (using the Demo) is probably the hardest current release out there for graphics cards. This will give us a look into what future games have in store for the 9600 XT, as they will be as hard, if not harder on it.

The 9600 XT makes a damn good run at High Quality play, we are scratching at 30FPS @ 1024. We will still need to tweak the card to get 60FPS out of it, but not to the degree of the 5600 Ultra. Although we are getting closer, these results lead me to believe that Half Life 2 might be run at 8x6, or highly tweaked 1024x768. Of course, at this level of card, we will not be running either with AA/AF on ?.

Max Payne 2

Max Payne 2 is a nice test of DirectX 9, using FRAPs we were able to get some frame rate samples. The results for Max Payne 2 were derived from 3 samples, the first two were in the first Hospital Scene and the 3rd was in the beginning of the 2nd Warehouse scene.

Max Payne 2 - 1024x768, Maximum Quality

Max Payne 2 - 1280x1024, Maximum Quality

As you can see, AA/AF makes almost no difference in Max Payne 2 as far as the 9600XT is concerned. The 5600 Ultra, however, gets a definite performance hit when applying AA/AF. Even with the latest “DirectX9 Fix” drivers from Nvidia, it appears that ATI still holds an advantage in this category.

Call of Duty

A new entry here at VL is the use of Call of Duty, CoD is a very nice variation of the Q3 engine, it should prove to be a nice OpenGL reference for the video cards (and we can get away from the silly FPS readings in Quake 3 / Jedi Knight and RTCW as well).

Call of Duty - 1024x768, Maximum Detail

Call of Duty - 1280x1024, Maximum Detail

As you can see by the results of VL's own timedemo on the Brecourt map, CoD is a good test producing lower frame rates thanks to it's highly tweaked Quake III Arena Engine, most notably the Texture and Lighting portion. As you can see from the graph, the 9600 XT more than outperforms the 5600 Ultra in this OpenGL environment. The 9600 XT even allows for very good playability at 2xAA/8xAF using a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 resolution. You could use 6xAA/8xAF on the 9600 XT (in 1024x768 resolution), but sub 60 fps in my book means back it up a notch. The 5600 Ultra plays CoD well at 1024x768 with No AA/AF, but fails miserably at giving you frame rates that you can actually play with at any other higher setting. Very interesting for a game that is based on an aging Quake 3 engine.

Catalyst 3.9

ATI was good enough to release the anticipated Cat 3.9's while I was finishing up this review. I quickly downloaded them and un-installed the 3.8's using . The first thing you notice is the OverDrive tab, what appears to be missing is your ability to actually control the speed at which your card runs. It appears ATI wants to control your OC dependent on the temperature of the GPU, all though there is no tab that allows you to read this temperature diode that is supposedly on board? I ran a few test with OverDrive turned off using Splinter Cell, CoD and UT2K3.

As you can see there was not much of a difference in the performance between the 3.8's and 3.9's, the OverDrive feature did add a little boost, but not what I would consider relevant and not up to what I was able to get from the Rage3D boost. I re-installed Rage3D and checked the Overclocker with OverDrive enabled. ATI had increased the GPU to 526.5 MHz, but memory was still at 300MHz, this could be the reason behind the slim increase using OverDrive comparative from the Rage3D increase.

Editor's Note: Please be aware that the Catalyst 3.9 drivers may break OpenGL for gaming purposes. We did no experience any OpenGL game issues with the 9600 Pro or XT, but all our All-in-Wonder variants required the hotfix to repair. You can learn more from our discussion in this thread.

The DDR memory used on the 9600 XT is Samsung 322 (K4D263238E-GC33), this is 300MHz DDR memory; the speed of the memory could be a bottleneck for overclocking. Our sample 9600XT overclocked well using Rage3D's overclocking add-on to the Catalyst drivers. By using the ratio of the stock clocking I increased the GPU in 5MHz increments and the Memory in 3MHz increments until I reached a plateau that showed artifacting in the CoD timedemo.

Once I found the sweet spot I ran it thru Splinter Cell, CoD and UT 2003, ensuring again that there was no artifacting. I was able to attain a GPU frequency of 563MHz and a Memory frequency of 338MHz, a nice 10% Overclock. I increased the AGP voltage from 1.5v to 1.6v, could I squeeze a few more MHz out of the 9600XT? It appears that will not improve the OC of the 9600XT. I was able to get more GPU frequency or more memory frequency, but the combination of 563/338 netted the best performance boost. Here we are comparing the Catalyst 3.8 Stock, 3.8 with Rage3D's Overclock utility and 3.9's with OverDrive enabled.

3D Image Quality

I took a screenshot in CoD using Fraps, one with No AA/AF, and one with (4x for Nvidia and 6x for ATI) AA/8xAF.

From left to right Radeon and Geforce No AA/AF

From left to right Radeon 6xAA/8xAF, Geforce 4xAA/8xAF

Notice the roofing tiles and the lines on the sandbags in the screenshots. It appears, at least from what I can see, that the 5600 Ultra is painting the picture slightly better than the 9600 XT. This is an interesting twist, as the ATI cards have painted the better picture in the past, maybe there is something to these 53.x drivers from Nvidia. On a side note, I was playing CoD MP to get the timedemo and had a VPU failure, the screen went black and about 4 or 5 seconds later, it came back, albeit at widescreen format. I found out later that I had neglected to change the AGP from the 1.65V that the 5600 Ultra required to the standard 1.5V, and the reason my screen came back without reboot, the VPU Recover, nice feature I must say.

2D Image Quality

I loaded up a 1280x1024 image David and Hubert normally use in our video card reviews. I also pulled up an HTML document with various sized fonts to judge the text rendering. The document used white text on a black background, and vice versa. The screen resolution for all tests was 1280x1024 @ 75Hz on a Hitachi CML175B (LCD).

Scores are subjective, but like most gamers out there I have worked with my share of video cards and believe I have a pretty firm grasp on what card renders 2D better than the others. The scores will be out of 10, with 10 being excellent.

The 9600XT and 5600 Ultra looked pretty close to me with the bitmap file, but there is an obvious quality drop when moving to the FX5600 when it comes to reading small text. The FX5600 rendered white text on a dark background horribly, and in order not to lose my eyesight, I had to use the mouse to select blocks of text I wanted to read.

Conclusion

Brook's 2 Cents

The ATI Radeon 9600 XT is a strong card for the price; at just under it is a relatively good deal. Add to that, you are getting a $49.99 game included (Half Life 2), you are looking at a real bargain for $130 USD! I was very impressed with the stock performance as well as the overclockability of this card.

I was disappointed in the Catalyst 3.9 drivers in that they did not offer a tab that showed me the temperature of the GPU, and that ATI controlled the amount of overclocking in the OverDrive tab.

Overall this card is the strongest contender to date in the "Midrange" market, and for that reason, it is replacing the 5600 Ultra that is in my main rig.

Hubert's 2 Cents

I do have some concerns about the Catalyst 3.9 drivers, and OpenGL issues, but it appears to be a problem for just the AIW cards. However, ATI has done a fine job in tweaking their 9600 series, and for the money, I really don't see any reason why anyone should look elsewhere when shopping for a sub-200$ video card. Performance is slightly ahead of the 9600 Pro, and the 9600 XT debuted at a lower price point as well. Image quality is top notch, and hey, it'll come with a voucher for one of the most highly anticipated games of the year.

Pros: Great Performance, Plays leading edge games well in High Quality mode, Good Overclockability, Good cooling / low noise, VPU Recover, Bundled with HL2

Cons: No Temperature tab, Included OverDrive controls overclocking rate with little performance improvement, Not as pretty as the Chaintech for you Acrylic case / window owners

Bottom Line: If you don't have the cash for a $300.00 + graphics card, but need performance for not just gaming, but overall graphics performance, come on down, we just found you a match. I would recommend as a Strong Buy. If you have any questions or comments be sure to hit me up in the Forums.

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