Tom's Hardware > All Reviews > Special > Miscellaneous > Facelift: The ATi Radeon 9600 XT

Facelift: The ATi Radeon 9600 XT

07:00 - Wednesday 15 October 2003 by Lars Weinand

1. Introduction
2. Introduction, Continued
3. Introduction, Continued
4. New Drivers - Catalyst V3.8
5. New Drivers - Catalyst V3.8, Continued
6. New Drivers - Catalyst V3.8, Continued
7. Test Setup
8. Benchmarks
9. Unreal Tournament 2003, Continued
10. Unreal Tournament 2003, Continued
11. Unreal Tournament 2003, Continued
12. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
13. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Continued

14. Aquamark 3
15. Aquamark 3, Continued
16. Aquamark 3, Continued
17. Tomb Raider - Angel Of Darkness
18. X2 Rolling Demo
19. X2 Rolling Demo, Continued
20. C&C Generals Demo
21. C&C Generals Demo, Continued
22. Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne
23. Warcraft III - The Frozen Throne, Continued
24. Freelancer Demo
25. MS Flight Simulator 2004
26. Battlefield 1942 - Secret Weapons Of WWII
27. Conclusion

The Radeon 9600 XT, codenamed RV360, is ATi's latest mainstream card, replacing the Radeon 9600 Pro. Like the Radeon 9800 XT, this card hardly differs from its predecessor. The memory speed, for example, remains unchanged.

The 3D features remain virtually unchanged as well. ATi's design still offers four pixel pipelines and two vertex shaders with a 128Bit memory interface. The Radeon 9600 XT has 128MB of memory, while a future 256 MB design is planned.

The main new feature is the clock speed of the graphics processor, which at 500MHz is 100 MHz faster than the 9600 Pro predecessor.

The Z-compression has also seen some improvement. The Hyper-Z III+ optimizations found in all XT cards now works at a compression rate of 24:1 compared to 8:1 on the 9600 Pro. That's all the information ATi has made available, so we can't give you any more details.