ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition: One Card for All

Final Words

As a card, the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is an excellent offering.  If possible to do without significantly driving costs up, we'd like to see Mac & PC compatible offerings of all of ATI's GPUs, ideally even doing away with discrete Mac and PC products and replacing them with a line of cards that just work regardless of platform. 

What ATI has done with the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is bring forth a 256MB card that offers a silent solution for those users wanting to move to a 30" Cinema Display.  The actual OS X UI performance of the card is just as good as ATI's top-of-the-line X800 XT. So, unless you are playing any games or running any applications that make extensive use of pixel shaders, the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is a very functional card to pair with a 30" display.  The biggest draw in our opinion is the card's passive cooling; combine that with its 256MB frame buffer and you have a pretty decent solution for OS X users. 

Unfortunately, once you fire up a game or applications like Motion or iMaginator that actually depend on good pixel shader performance, the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition starts showing the age of its GPU.  Honestly, for $200, we'd expect something closer to the entry level X800s or even the X700 Pro in terms of performance, not a two-year-old Radeon 9600 Pro.  While ATI is making great efforts to bring equality between Mac and PC platforms by releasing a universal card like this one, by doing so on such a old and, by today's standards, underperforming GPU platform doesn't really help all that much. 

So, while the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition is useful, it is not the product that we're dreaming of.  It is a fine solution for those users who are still running non-GPU accelerated applications, but not too useful beyond that. 

Alongside the release of the Radeon 9600 Pro Mac & PC Edition, ATI is also changing around their retail Mac product line, as you can see from the slide below:

You can see that the Radeon X800 XT will receive a price cut sometime this month from $499 to $399.  The Radeon 9800 Pro Mac Special Edition will be killed off, as will the 128MB 9800 Pro, and both will be replaced by a single AGP 4X Radeon 9800 Pro with 256MB of memory priced at $299. 

Then, of course, there's the 9600 Pro announced today at $199, which should be available shortly. 

What's important to note here is that other than the entry level Radeon 9200, all of ATI's Mac Retail products will feature 256MB of memory.  And the mid-range cards will have completely done away with ADC connectors in favor of dual DVI or DVI + VGA.  While ATI has not announced any plans to bring any of their 512MB cards to the Mac market, we'd expect them to do so sometime next year.