Date: |
December 11th, 2003 |
Price: |
$199.00 |
Sponsors: |
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Author: |
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Score: |
9/10 |
ATi Radeon 9600 XT 128 MB Video Card Catalyst Drivers
Note: We made a typo in this review
when referring to this video card as the 256MB Version. Sorry for the
inconvenience. Again, this card is 128MB, not
256MB.
ATi’s attempt to push NVIDIA out of the way in their version of King of
the Hill wasn’t just by creating excellent hardware. The Radeon 8500 was an excellent card,
but, clearly, there were some problems with the drivers. As we all know, ATi has remedied the
issue and is still finding areas to improve upon in the
drivers.
At the time of this article ATi has recently just put out their Catalyst
3.9 Driver suite for their Radeon line of graphic cards. Now, this version certainly isn’t ground
breaking news, but we’ll go through the basics and give some analysis on what
works, what doesn’t, and what we’d like to see improved for the next
version.
We’d like to give ATi props for combining the Control Panel and Driver
into one installation, not exactly new in this release, but it is still worth
noting. Many times some kids at a
LAN Party would forget to download the Control Panel at all and would miss out
completely on setting many features such as Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic
Filtering.
Looking in the display properties we can see the Radeon 9600 XT is merely
described as a 9600 Series product by Windows. With only a slight few differences
between the different revisions of 9600 cards ATi produces, this is no surprise
to us. Don’t get confused, this
card is still slightly faster than its Pro counterpart, however the
graphics processor unit is essentially the same architecture. What allows for the added speed is a
smaller die size.
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