Radeon 9600 XT Review

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The one potential weakness that the 9600 XT may show in a competitive environment is that of the memory choice. Clearly ATI have targeted the board at a very competitive mainstream price, and the choice of memory speed is probably due to cost constraints to meet this price. There will be some situations, such as those titles that rely on more fixed function processing, or heavy FSAA use, where plenty of bandwidth is still a large requirement, however under heavy shader use situations, when the operations are ALU bound, the computational power, of which speed is a large factor, becomes more important. This is potentially a risky move for ATI as it may be difficult to show the 9600 XT in its best light with the mix of games and tiles being used and benchmarked as the mix of shader usage in games and benchmarks is still relatively low.

All in all, though, the Radeon 9600 XT does its job well – it’s a small, relatively unassuming little card that handles today’s titles with ease and still has the good image quality of the rest of the R300 chip line. It manages to outperform the 9600 PRO in all cases, whilst being no more expensive than the 9600 PRO’s entry price, and finally puts it up there with the 9500 PRO in many cases