ATI Radeon 9000 Pro – The GeForce4 MX Killer

Overclocking

One of the benefits of a smaller die with fewer transistors is that the headroom on the RV250 should be greater than what we've seen with the Radeon 8500. In order to put this theory to the test we overclocked our Radeon 9000 Pro board from its stock speeds of 270/275 and ended up with 300/315. The 11% boost in core speed helps a bit but it still prevents the Radeon 9000 Pro from surpassing the GeForce4 Ti 4200, but in terms of doing its job of competing with the GeForce4 MX, an overclocked Radeon 9000 Pro does it all that much better.

Final Words

Although clearly not the most interesting ATI product being released today, the Radeon 9000 Pro does its job quite well. The Radeon 9000 Pro, at $129, is able to outperform the fastest GeForce4 MX in most situations and falls behind it in Quake III based games. The performance hit you do take with the Radeon 9000 Pro is worth it however, with the 9000 Pro you get full DirectX 8 pixel and vertex shader support that the GeForce4 MX cannot offer.

When the Radeon 8500LE was released we knew that NVIDIA was feeling quite threatened in the sub-$200 market, but with the $109 and $129 MSRPs of the Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9000 Pro we see every reason for NVIDIA to be worried for this holiday selling season. The RV250 does a much better job of sacrificing features for price than the NV17 core that drives the GeForce4 MX and it does so in such a way that it can carry a very affordable price tag.

It's a shame that ATI had to wait this long to bring out the RV250 core however, it could have been great competition for the GeForce4 MX from the start. But in order to prevent cannibalizing Radeon 8500 sales, the RV250 had to be held off until the R300 was ready to launch. Luckily for NVIDIA, NV31 is coming around the corner and it should bring positive new meaning to their MX line of GPUs.

An even more appealing venture for the RV250 will be in the mobile market, as the core will be the basis of ATI's next-generation Radeon Mobility chip that's due out soon. Considering how it performs against the desktop GeForce4 MX, ATI can be fairly confident that they won't lose traction in the mobile market anytime soon.