With a majority of the market focusing their attention on high-end graphics cards, many forget about the consumers who are seeking a low-cost upgrade or replacement part.  These consumers are often willing to sacrifice performance when looking for cards with price points that are substantially lower than enthusiast-class boards.  Yet they seek performance levels which are adequate for the occasional death-match.  This is where ATI's mid-range card, the Radeon 9250, steps in.  Taking into consideration the values of the mid-range demographic, ATI has tried to produce a card which offers a rich list of specifications, yet is easy on the not-so-padded wallet.

Offering four pixel-pipeline, AGP 8x support and 128MB of DDR RAM, the ATI Radeon 9250 rounds off the tail end of ATi's product line.  Though there are no swank fans with blinking LED's to be found, the eye-catching cutaway on the PCB board clearly distinguishes this card from the rest of pack.  In the following pages we will be covering an overview of the card itself, followed by benchmarks with comparison to Diamonds S100 and S110, overclocking ability and lastly, our final thoughts.  So, let's not waste anymore time and fire this card up...

Specifications & Features Tech-Specs of the ATI Radeon 9250

Visual Inspection Whipping out the eye-glass

Physically, ATi's Radeon 9250 does not sport anything out of the ordinary (cutaway aside).  Located in the center of the card, there is a black anodized aluminum heatsink which is attached to the green PCB by two spring clips and thermal epoxy.  Though the use of epoxy does ensure the heatsink will stay in place, it does present an inconvenience for those consumers who wish to alter the stock cooling solution. Although, we doubt potential buyers would buy this card with the intent of modifying it.  Surrounding the VPU are the eight (four on the front, four on the back) standard DDR SGRAM 16Mx16 chips (16MB each x 8 chips = 128MB).  The inclusion of VGA, S-Video and composite connections provides the user with a wide variety of connectivity options.  However, we where a bit disappointed to see the absence of a DVI port which could potentially discourage some LCD using consumers from buying this card.

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:

We tested the ATI Radeon 9250, on an i865G based Intel D865GBF motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 400MHz (in dual-channel mode) and set the AGP aperture size to 512MB. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and a 768MB permanent page file was created. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests. Throughout our testing, ATi's drivers were configured for maximum visual quality.

HotHardware Test Rig Our Testing Toy...

Radeon 9250 Image Comparison Replace

Image Comparison - Unreal Tournament 2004
1024x768 - No AA	1024x768 - 2x AA	1024x768 - 4x AA	1024x768 - 6x AA

Located above are some screen shots taken with UT2004 at a resolution of 1024x768 with all detail settings maxed out.  Moving from left to right, as the AA level was increased, you'll notice a slight decrease in the amount of "jaggies" along the edges of various objects.  The most notable area is the vertical metal beams, in the bottom windows, near the tank.  To more clearly see the changes in image quality, open up the four images in different windows and Alt + Tab between them.

Click Image To View Full Size - 1024x768 (Max Detail)

For those of you who are considering using this card for some occasional gaming; we fired up Activison's latest expansion pack, United Offensive, for their very popular WWII game, Call of Duty.  To showcase the visual performance of the 9250 we ran the game at a resolution of 1024x768 with all the detail settings maxed out.  Though the game did slow down during some intense battle sequences, it was still fairly playable.  However, for smooth consistent game play, we would probably recommend lowering the visuals settings down a bit.  With all that in mind, click through the images above and enjoy the eye-candy.

Performance Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01 A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

Final Fantasy XI

The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant to check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to both its "High Resolution" (1024x768) and "Lowest Resolution" (640x480) option with anti-aliasing disabled.

To start things off we off we ran SquareSofts's Final Fantasy XI's synthetic benchmark.  Unlike our other tests, this benchmark bases its results on the total amount of processed frames, instead on the average frame rate. The more frames the card can produce, the higher the resulting number.  In both sets of test, high and low resolution, all cards produced fairly similar results.  Initially in the low setting, Diamond's S100 (9600SE) took the lead by rendering 61 more frames then the 9250.  However, when the resolution was increased, the 9250 took the chief position by 139 frames.  In a general context, if we take the average of each card for the two tests, we find that the 9250 faired better on average in this particular scenario by about 1.3%.

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3 DX8 & DX9 Shaders

Aquamark 3

Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of game developer Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8-class shaders.  This led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Because the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9-class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7, as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 640 x 480 and 800 x 600 with no anti-aliasing enabled.

This benchmark is very dependant on the Fill Rate and Shader performance of each card's VPU.  Though the above results are relatively low, we can see that the S100 (9600SE) clearly stepped over 9250 by an average of about 30%.  Specifically looking at the difference between the 9250 and 9200, one can find that the 9250 consistently outperformed its predecessor, though by just a slight margin, by about 2.5%.

Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004 Epic's Next Smash Hit!

Unreal Tournament 2K4

Epic's "Unreal" games have been wildly popular ever since the original Unreal was released in the late '90s. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and then Unreal Tournament 2003 rapidly became some of our favorites for both benchmarking and for killing a few hours when our schedules permitted it. Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used a patched (v3120) full version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 800x600 and 1,024 x 768, without any anti-aliasing.  In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of a multiplayer match for our benchmark runs.

The flyby timedemo we ran was recorded in the "Antalus" map with no bots present; while the BotMatch timedemo was recorded in the "Asbestos" map with multiple bots.  Once again, the S100 (9600SE) took a slight lead over the 9250 in all four of the tests with an average lead of 8.5%.  While on the other hand, the 9250 continued to hold its lead over the 9200 by about 2%

Benchmarks &Comparisons With Doom 3 - Single Player The Wait Is Over!.

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics.  Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 were all instrumental in the success of 3D accelerators on the PC.  Now, years later, with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with a 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the release of the visually stunning Doom 3.  Doom 3 is an OpenGL game using extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows.  We ran custom demo benchmarks with Doom 3 set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 640 x 480, then 800 x 600.

With all three of the cards turning very similar results, in most cases only being separated by a fraction of a frame, this was the closest round of testing.  The only consistent trends which can be established from the numbers above are the results from the 9200, which unfortunately put it last once again.  As for the 9250 and the S100 (9600SE), we're going to call the performance between the two, a draw.  On average, there was only a 0.13 frame per second difference between their levels of performance.

Benchmarks &Comparisons With Doom 3 - Multi-Player The Wait Is Over!.

Doom 3

The first round of Doom 3 focused on single-player performance.  Now we'll run a round of multiplayer tests and see how things unfold.  These tests were taken with our custom "HH_Frag2" demo, which is a recording of a five-player online match in the "Frag Chamber" map area. We ran benchmarks with Doom 3 set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 640 x 480 and 800 x 600 without AA enabled.

In reference to our numbers from the single player tests, one can see that things where neck & neck once again.  In this round, the 9250 technically came out on top by a difference of about 4% or 0.8 FPS.  However, the variance between all three is once again so small, that we feel this round again falls into the tied category.

Overclocking The ATi Radeon 9250 Making Fast Faster...

We also spent some time overclocking the ATi Radeon 9250.  After finding the maximum stable VPU core and memory clock speeds, we fired up the Final Fantasy XI benchmark and Unreal Tournament 2004 again so see what kind of performance gains we'd achieved...

Using PowerStrip v3.54, we where able to obtained about a 19% (56.6MHz) increase in speed which brought the VPU core from a stock 238.5MHz to 295MHz, when overclocked.  Also, we where able to increase the memory clock speed from the stock 200.25MHz by 24.75 MHz which placed the overclocked speed at 225Mhz, about an 11% increase.  Running UT2004 again, we saw about a 16% increase, and in FFXI, we achieved about a 9% increase in total processed frames.  During the test runs, the card proved to be very stable and did not produce any noticeable visual artifacts.  All and all, we were very pleased with the extra performance boost we were able to squeeze out of the card.

Conclusion Final Thoughts

Benchmark Summary:

When looking at our benchmark results, it's clear that the Radeon 9250 and 9600SE perform similarly.  The Radeon 9600 scored victories in 9 of the tests, while the 9250 took the top spot in six.  Most of the wins for the 9250 came during the OpenGL powered Doom3 set of tests, however, where none of the cards we tested came close to producing playable framerates.

When evaluated in the proper context, the ATi Radeon 9250 is a decent video card.  What consumers need to do is seriously consider what they are looking for in a video card.  If playing graphically intense games is their main goal, the 9250 is obviously not for them.  However, if improving their 2D desktop environment, whether it is for DVD's, photo editing or other applications, the 9250 will perform the task wonderfully.  This is not to say that this card will not handle some of the newer games on the market, you just may have to turn down some of the eye-candy to achieve playable framerates.

From a feature standpoint, our only gripe with the 9250 is the lack of DVI port.  Though most users who are considering this card as an upgrade will probably not have invested the extra money into a DVI capable LCD, it is a possible limiting factor which reduces the overall appeal of the card.  With that said, some of ATI's partners have taken this into consideration and have incorporated a DVI port in their products.  Their is also a slew of other OEMs which feature alterations such as a full half-height card layout.  Overall, gamers should probably look for a more powerful video card, but someone looking to upgrade from an integrated graphics solution or replace a similar performing card would be hard pressed to find a better value than the Radeon 9250.  At under $60 for a 128MB model, the 9250 is very affordable.

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