Being a student, money isn't something that I have a whole lot of. I still do consider myself something of an enthusiast, but the reality is, I don't have 400$ to blow on the latest video cards. I do play a fair number of games though, so I am ready to spend what I can afford, which is why I've been such a nVidia mark for a long time. The GeForce 4 Ti4200 has always done the job for me, but I hesitated when the AGP8x came out. Given my lack of will power, I picked it up anyways. The main reason for the hesitation was that I didn't think the bump to AGP8x was worth it, but the other reason was I was getting bored with nVidia. Don't get me wrong, it's still a good board, but I never felt it was much more than a speed bumped GeForce 3. The image quality wasn't too good, and considering the amount of time I spent writing code, this was another area I wanted to address.
I briefly considered the Matrox Parhelia, but the price tag and gaming performance left much to be desired (yes, that was a dig). The Radeon 9700 Pro was something I wanted, but that wasn't cheap either. I did end up with a good compromise though, and today we'll be looking at the OEM ATi 9500 Pro.
Specifications
Fast 3D gaming performance
Complete Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 support
128MB of DDR memory
8-pixel pipeline architecture
128-bit memory interface
Video output support
Featuring CATALYST™ - Industry-leading software suite
I'm not going to fill up the page with all the specifications, so if you want to know every detail, feel free to checkout their .
The ATi 9500 Pro
The 9500 Pro shares essentially the same feature set as the 9700 Pro. Both are based on the 0.15u manufacturing process. Both have eight rendering pipelines, and four geometry pipelines. In fact, items such as the RAMDAC speeds, AGP8x, DX9 support, and the technology features (Smartshader, Truform, etc) are identical. That is where the similarities end.
The obvious difference is the clock speed. The Radeon 9700 Pro is clocked at 325MHz, while the 9500 Pro is 50MHz slower at 275MHz. The memory used is also slower, which is 270MHz (540MHz DDR). Another change with the memory is that the memory bus is 128-bits. The 9700 Pro has a 256-bit pathway, which is why it dominates at higher resolutions. The result is 8.8GB/sec of bandwidth for the 9500 Pro and almost 20GB/sec for the 9700 Pro. The last difference is the PCB layout, which isn't all that important really.
The changes from the 9700 Pro to the 9500 Pro explain the much lower price tag, which could be as much as 100% depending where you shop. I have seen the card for as low as . As much as enthusiasts would like to have the fastest, the reality is that the majority of the consumer market is made up of cards under 200$.
The input/output options allows for you to run a dual monitor setup via Hydravision. I don't have a second monitor to test this, but along with a standard VGA connection, you also have a DVI connection. If you want to power two CRT monitors, a DVI-to-VGA connection is available either separately or in the retail box.
Overclocking and 9700 Pro Mod
There have been some discussions about overclocking the 9500 Pro, as it seems that ATi put a lock overclocking. I followed the , and unfortunately, I was not able to overclock the 9500 Pro, at least not unless I did a BIOS flash. Considering my budget, and the fact that I purchased this card on my own dime, flashing the BIOS with a hack on a video card isn't something I had much desire in doing.
Why the problems? My guess is ATi wanted to avoid having to deal with dead cards, but more likely, since it's the same GPU as the 9700 Pro, the last thing they'd want are people overclocking their 9500 Pros to 9700 Pro speeds. If this were the case, nobody would be buying the much more expensive 9700 Pro.
For the 9700 Pro mod, there are a few factors that will have to be observed. For one thing, you need to have a non-Pro version of the card, on the older PCB. My PCB has the ram lined up (four on the front and four on the back), so even if I had a non-Pro, I would only end up with a 9500 Pro after the mod. Since I have a 9500 Pro anyways, this mod didn't work for me.
Test Setup
MSI KT4 Ultra KT400: Athlon XP 2400+ (15x133: 2.0GHz), 2 x 256MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 Ram, ATi 9500 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, Direct X 9.0, VIA Hyperion 4in1 v4.45, ATi Catalyst 3.2
Test Software
3D Mark 2001 SE
Unreal Tournament 2003
Serious Sam 2: Second Encounter
The comparison card will be a MSI Ti4200-T8x, which has also been reviewed here at VL. This is an AGP8x board, and the 9500 Pro's direct competition. The Detonator version was 43.45. A clean install of the OS was done for each card to maintain a clean test environment.
3D Mark 2001 SE
The first test is just to establish a baseline between the Ti4200 and the 9500 Pro. We used the last 3D Mark 2001 build, and ran at 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 with the default settings, and no AA.
The Radeon 9500 Pro gets the better of the Ti4200 at all resolutions. At each resolution, we have close to, or over 1000 3D Marks discrepancy. This is an old benchmark though, and a synthetic one as well, so let's take a look at some real world benchmarks.
Unreal Tournament 2003
I'm a big UT mark, so naturally the first thing I installed after Windows (and the 180MB of patches and service packs) was UT2003. I used the great UT2003 benchmarker from [H]. It runs a series of tests, and is very customizable. The following benchmarks are the average results at 1024, 1280, and 1600. AA and AF results will also be displayed. We'll be demonstrating the Antalus and Inferno benchmarks.
Antalus Benchmark - No AA, No AF
Antalus Benchmark - 4xAA, 8xAF
Antalus Benchmark - 6xAA, 16xAF
At all resolutions, the 9500 Pro is keeping consistent by besting the Ti4200. With no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, the 9500 Pro holds a large lead over the Ti4200. When you start turning on AA and AF, the gap just flat out widens. The 9500 Pro loses about 60% of its performance at 1024x768 when moving to 4xAA, 8xAF, and the Ti4200 loses approximately 78%. In saying that, the Radeon 9500 Pro is still somewhat playable, but you can forget about it with the Ti4200, unless you like getting fragged a lot while watching the slideshow. At 1024 resolution, the 9500 Pro still stays above 40 frames per second at 6xAA and 16xAF (the Ti4200 cannot support this level of AA and AF), but any resolution higher than this will make for some jerky gameplay.
Inferno Benchmark - No AA, No AF
Inferno Benchmark - 4xAA, 8xAF
Inferno Benchmark - 6xAA, 16xAF
The Inferno benchmark hits video cards a little harder than the Antalus, and as we can see above, the Ti4200 is struggling hard. The 9500 Pro isn't exactly having a ball, but it does maintain playable framerates at 1024, but the higher resolutions and increased AA and AF settings slow things down by 50% from no AA/AF to 6xAA, 16xAF.
Serious Sam: Second Encounter - Page 4
SS is one of those old school shooters where the goal is to blow away anything that moves. There's some story also, but who cares. We run it in OpenGL mode, and tested the same resolution and AA/AF settings as we did UT2003.
Serious Sam: Second Encounter - No AA, No AF
Serious Sam: Second Encounter - 4xAA, 8xAF
Serious Sam: Second Encounter - 6xAA, 16xAF
Since there's no point in mentioning the 9500 Pro leading the Ti4200 (again), I will point out some things that I feel would be important to gamers. No AA/AF is something the 9500 Pro can handle with ease. Even at 1600 resolution, you're not going to have many problems. Turning on AA and AF is a different story. In my opinion, you're going to be limited at 1024 resolution if you're going to maintain a 60fps pace. Anything higher creates a large decrease in performance. At 1600x1200, there's a 73% drop from No AA/AF to 6xAA, 16xAF.
Image Quality
3D image quality was excellent, on par with the best ATi has to offer. 2D image quality wasn't too shabby either, and even at 1600x1200 on a 19" Trinitron, text is fairly clear, though it is tiny. To test the 2D quality, I used the VL 1600x1200 test image, as well as a couple Word documents with various sized letters ranging from 6 points to 12 points. The first word document was black text on a white background, and the second was the same document, black and white reversed. I tested for readability on the text document, and overall image quality on the test picture.
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ATi Radeon 9500 Pro
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MSI Ti4200-T8x
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Black Text (12Pt)
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9
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8
|
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Black Text (6Pt)
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9
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6
|
|
White Text (12Pt)
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8
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6
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White Text (6Pt)
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8
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4
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Bitmap Quality
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9
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8
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In regards to 2D quality, the Radeon 9500 Pro presented a nicer image overall. Although these tests are subjective, I spend a lot of time programming, and after a few weeks with the 9500 Pro, I am wishing I made the leap to ATi long ago.
Final Words
As we've seen in the tests, the 9500 Pro easily handles whatever competition the Ti4200 was able to provide. Both cards are AGP8x, and both had 128MB of ram, so performance came down to the architecture. Along with DirectX 9 support, and the hardware features of the 9500 Pro, it's a tough card to beat.
Considering the price of the card, I am having a hard time faulting the card. If there's one thing that bothered me was the fact that overclocking isn't something you can do out of the box. You're going to have to work at it and even by doing so there are no guarantees.
Image quality was excellent, and the drivers have been rock solid for me. I did run into an issue with DirectX 9 and the Catalyst 3.2 drivers when running Direct3D games and benchmarks. Both UT2003 and 3D Mark 2001SE constantly crashed on me. The solution was to reinstall DX9 on top of itself, then uninstall the Catalyst drivers, and then reinstall them. For whatever reason, everything works now. I suppose the best procedure when it comes to DX9/Catalyst 3.2 is to install DX9 first, followed by the drivers.
With the 9600 Pro out and about, it may not make all that much sense to pick up a 9500 Pro, but if you can find one for a decent price, I have no problem recommending it.
Pros: Decent price for a performance card. Great image quality, and good performance
Cons: Overclocking not possible without a hack (if it'll even work at all).
Bottom Line: If you're serious about games, but want to be able to eat during the month, this card is worth a look. In all fairness to the Ti4200, it is about 30$ to 50$ cheaper, but I think the extra cash is well worth it. Maybe it's worth skipping a couple of lunches to pay for. If you got any comments, be sure to hit us up in our forums.
