ATI's Radeon 9500 Pro

Final Words

With the Radeon 9500 Pro ATI has filled a hole in their product line that has existed ever since the Radeon 9700 Pro was released. With the Radeon 9500 Pro ATI finally has something to compete with the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and Ti 4400; but is it too little too late?

A lot of that depends on what you're looking for in a graphics card. Street prices for the Ti 4200 and Ti 4400 are both well under the $199 SRP of the Radeon 9500 Pro and in terms of raw performance, the Radeon 9500 Pro falls in between those two. You get much better performance with the Radeon 9500 Pro than you would with the Ti 4200 but it also comes at a good $50 - $65 than most Ti 4200 cards.

The one big win (it's up to you whether or not this is an advantage) the Radeon 9500 Pro has over the Ti 4200/4400 is its full DirectX 9 compliance. If you're the type of user that upgrades their graphics card every 6 - 9 months anyways, then buying the 9500 Pro because of its DX9 support wouldn't make too much sense. However if you're looking for a card for the long haul, you'll have to weigh DX9 support in your overall decision.

The regular Radeon 9500 isn't too exciting of a card, especially looking at the performance of the Radeon 9500 Pro. We'd expect the regular Radeon 9500 to be the eventual successor to the Radeon 9000 Pro but not a solution for most performance minded gamers.

Quite possibly much more exciting than the Radeon 9500 Pro is the regular (non-Pro) Radeon 9700; a much cheaper version of the 9700 that still offers higher performance than the GeForce4 Ti 4600 isn't a bad deal at all and it's what we'd suggest you look out for.

With cards like the Radeon 9500 Pro coming out, DX9 technology is quickly being pushed into the mainstream which will enable developers to begin to use a lot of the API's more compelling features. It's the classic chicken-and-egg scenario when it comes to DX8/9 compliant games, and it's about time that we start getting some chickens.