With the Radeon 9000 announcement you need to keep in mind that actually two new products within that 9000 range have been born. The Radeon 9000 and the 9000 Pro. As you can guess the Pro is the faster one and also the one we are testing.

Besides everything you need in these videocards ATI focuses a lot on the following features:

• Quad-pipe architecture: Four parallel rendering pipelines power the applications with high speed. Four texturing pipelines pumping textures into triangles animated by a hardware Vertex Shader and achieves per pixel programmable effects through a hardware Pixel Shader.
• Hardware Vertex Shader (v1.1) to handle on-board the massive geometric complexity of new games.
• Programmable pixel (v1.4) and vertex shaders: Which in one word ATI's calls SmartShader technology. Basically it takes advantage of the advanced features in Microsoft DirectX 8.1 and means even the newest and most advanced 3D games will be fully supported. No DirectX9 hardware features Like pixel and Vertex 2.0 shaders though. That's where the Radeon 9700 comes in.
  • Pixel Shader to add per pixel shadows as that help create life-like textures and to create the most realistic finest water and lighting effects on the smallest of objects, such as fur, hair, or blades of grass
• Multiple display architecture supported by Hydravision ATI's desktop management software enabling productive and effective use of multiple displays.
• New Fullstream technology leverages pixel shaders to accelerate video and improve the quality and scalability of streaming video. Something I'm quite excited about.
  • Solid video playback hardware, which decodes MPEG2 for DVD, de-interlaces video for display on a TV and enhances online video playback. The 3D Prophet 9000 series means faster games, and finer realistic texturing effects, thanks to its large texturing engine and its? the hardware acceleration of Microsoft DirectX 8 API hardware acceleration.

If you are thinking that the Radeon 9000 is a cheap runoff of the Radeon 8500 then you are wrong. This is a new silicon designed in a way it will keep production costs low. Fewer transistors and a cut down that handles 1 texel per cycle. As result this means higher production yields and thus cost reduction. The word castrated pixel pipelines just popped into my mind ;)

Just like the Radeon 8500 the Radeon 9000 has four pixel pipelines. However, as just stated,  they can only calculate 1 texel per cycle compared to two on the Radeon 8500. To compromise this the end pixel increases from three to six. Rather confusing but basically the outcome of this means that the Radeon 9000 in theory is slower than a Radeon 8500 in games with multi-texturing and the benchmarks will back that theory up.

The main difference between the normal and the Pro version basically boils down to performance. To get you an idea where the product is compared to the competition take a look at this table:

ATI is shipping a Radeon 9000 Pro graphics card, featuring 64MB of DDR memory and dual-display support including DVI-I, VGA and TV-out with a suggested retail price of 149 USD while Creative Asia will sell them for 129 USD. I expect within a month that the 64Mb model will sell for about 100 USD.