Radeon 9000 Pro
Codename: RV250

Manufacturer: ATI
Written by: Hilbert Hagedoorn
Date: Friday July 26, 2002

ATI means business, they are focused to get into that number one spot in the consumer videocard arena eagerly. And guess what, they are doing just that. Solid yet wide-range products, good marketing and reputation took them to the next level of consumer graphics. At least with the recent announcement of the Radeon 9000 and 9700 they might just do that.

Although this site has been called 'NVIDIA' fan site more often then I wanted to hear I think by now you can agree with me, we definitely are not. We bring you facts not false rumors on any videocard and whether that information is about ATI, NVIDIA, Matrox of 3D Labs we don't care. We just love what we are doing, and that's bringing you objective info, plus we get to play around with cool stuff of course ;)

Something is happening on our site though, we can see a large increase/shift towards ATI  product reviews. It's not that we like the company so incredible much, no ATI's products are getting better, faster and more competitive with every release. More importantly, ATI started selling their silicon's to manufacturers like Gigabyte and Hercules (many more won't name them all). By moving the production of ATI based videocards to other manufacturers their sales channel expanded. ATI's products often where not available in shops where where Hercules and Gigabyte sell their products and have obtained a much larger market channel to sell their products through. The volume production for ATi's graphics cores must have a quite increased yet interesting number. The consumer notices that as it sees those products in the shop and our site reflects what you, the consumer wants to see.

In the upcoming pages we will review the all new graphics card Radeon 9000 Pro as sent in by ATI themselves. This all new Radeon 9000 Pro is of course a reference based videocard, here in Europe you will mainly be able to get it as Hercules, Gigabyte and in the near future maybe even Creative Labs product.

The new 9000 series are the mainstream 2D/3D videocard in the category 'mid-range' and will compete with the GeForce4 MX series videocard line-up from  NVIDIA. Don't let the phrase 'mid-range' fool you though. This product is basically a Radeon 8500 (totally different silicon though) however with a very low  price tag. We call it 'mid-range' because in the next 6 to 12 months other products will take the lead. In a month from now Radeon 9700 will be available, a few months later followed by NVIDIA's NV30, and rumors in the channel say that 3D Labs has something interesting in the works, say Christmas, also.

Quite frankly these are exciting times for the graphics arena, which I love being part of. In the next pages we'll tell you a tad more about the Radeon 9000 family, the silicon, the technology, features after we'll put it to the test in a round of heavy benchmarks/tests and will compare it to the competition. Does this card have what it takes to be the next mainstream product ? Let's find out ..