New Radeon 9500 Reported to be Released This Month


From various sources around the web, it appears that ATI's lower-priced Radeon 9500 graphics card will make its appearance this month.

ATI previously stated in July that the Radeon would ship in Q3. However, DigiTimes has reported that ATI will ship the card next week, although the company has not set an explicit date.

The 9500 is expected to be only slightly slower than the current high-end Radeon 9700. The 9500 sports a slightly lesser clock than the 9700, running at 275MHz. The 9500 will be accompanied by the 9500 Pro, which also differs only marginally from the 9700 in terms of its architecture. A cost-saving measure for the 9500/Pro will bea 128-bit memory bus.

According to xbitlabs, both cards will support 8x AGP and Direct X 9.0. The 9500 Pro will have eight rendering pipelines, versus four for the 9500.

ATI expect the 9500 series to go head to head with the nVidia GeForce Ti 4200 card.

Analysis: Apple uses both nVidia and ATI cards on its current range of Power Mac G4s, but these mid-range cards could well be offered as standard or options on intermediate Power Mac systems sometime next year. Given the impressive specification, they should also offer good upgrade options for older AGP Power Macs with less impressive graphics chipsets.