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Head-to-Head / Performance
With Serious Sam: TSE |
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Kill Some Aliens With Croteam's Shooter! |
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Serious Sam: The Second
Encounter tells a similar story. When overclocked, the
Radeon 9600 Pro outperformed the 9500 Pro at 1024x768, with
and without AA enabled. At 1600x1200 with AA disabled,
the 9600 Pro was again able to surpass the 9500 Pro, but
once AA was enabled at this high resolution, the 9500 Pro
held onto a small advantage.
These overclocking results
certainly cast the ATi Radeon 9600 Pro in a much more
positive light. With no modifications made to the card
whatsoever, we were able to raise core clock speeds by
119MHz, which equates to a 30% increase. The on-board
memory also overclocked very well, climbing 22% from a stock
speed of 300MHz (600MHz DDR) to 366MHz (732MHz). If
these results are typical with boards sold at retail, ATi is
going to win over the hearts of many "tweakers" out there,
who live to tinker with their rigs.
So, why would ATi release this
card at "only" 400MHz / 300MHz when there seems to be so
much headroom left with this product? The answer:
Yield. The Radeon 9600 Pro should be a very high yield
part. We don't have any solid numbers from ATi, but we
would bet that the vast majority of cores coming out of TSMC
will run at 400MHz, or below, like the parts that will
eventually be used on the Radeon 9600 "non-Pro".
Having more useable parts, means less wasted cores and
faster production of boards...which means higher profits for
ATi and increased availability for the consumer. If
all this holds true, prices should drop relatively quickly,
which would make the Radeon 9600 a much more attractive
product.
There are a ton of folks just like you in HotHardware's PC
Hardware Forum...Go There Now!
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