ATI Introduces Mobility Radeon 9600 Family

ATI launched its latest product family at CeBIT on Thursday, the Mobility Radeon 9600 family of visual processors. The 9600 is the first mobile graphics processor to ship with hardware support for DirectX 9.0 and Version 2.0 programmable Pixel and Vertex Shaders. The 9600 relies on a 3-D core that delivers 12 Pixel Shader operations per clock cycle, which industry benchmarks indicate are nearly a 50% performance improvement over the competition's desktop graphics processors. The Mobility Radeon 9600 provides a flexible architecture with full pin and driver compatibility across multiple product generations and allows original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to design notebooks with upgradeable graphics for their end users. The Mobility Radeon 9600 is also the first mobile graphics processor to integrate an HDTV chip to enable component output to wide screen high definition television sets (HDTVs).

Mobility Radeon 9600 also delivers the first mobile visual processor to support
GDDR2-M memory, providing DDR-2 memory speeds with battery life and power saving technology. This processor allows OEMs to choose either discrete memory chips or one of three chip variants offering up to 128 MB of integrated memory on the chipset.

The features included with the Mobility Radeon 9600 include ATI's SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology, for theatre effects next-generation games and applications; OVERDRIVE, a controlled over-clocking system; HyperM, bandwidth optimizing technology; SMOOTHVISION 2.1 image quality enhancing; POWERPLAY 4.0 to extend battery life; and AGP8X support.