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For more than two years now, there has been an established hierarchy in the graphics card market. It has been understood and accepted almost without question that the best performing graphics card solutions have been supplied by nVidia.
Cards based on its GeForce chips have been made the standard by which all other cards are judged, and the launch of the GeForce 4 range in spring of this year secured it at the top of the video tree.
For the first time in a while, ATi claims to have the jump on its rival.
It has two new chips ready to launch. The Radeon 9700 will go head to head with the fastest GeForce 4 Ti graphics cards, while cards based on its Radeon 9000 chip are set to challenge the dominance of GeForce 4 MX cards, which dominate the mid-range graphics market.
The 9000 card we tested will not actually be sold in this form. Like nVidia, ATi now gets manufacturers to build graphics cards based on its graphics chips. Hercules and Gigabyte are among the companies carrying ATi cards and 9000-based ones are expected to start around the £130 mark.
We tested the prototype graphics card supplied by ATi and it scored roughly in line with what we had been led to expect. In our lab tests, it outperformed the cards we've tested based on the GeForce 4 MX chip to the tune of 40 per cent, despite being similarly priced.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, the MX cards actually have more in common with the GeForce 2 graphics card than the GeForce 4 with which they share a name.
As the GeForce 2 is now two years old, some of its shortcomings are starting to show. The Radeon 9000 on the other hand, shares a lot of its technology with the Radeon 8500 that was launched early in 2002.
ATi's technology has always been pretty reasonable but it has always trailed nVidia when it comes to drivers. Drivers for graphics and sound cards need to be good to ensure performance and stability is delivered.
ATi has struggled in the past to make good quality drivers available, leading to poor performance and reliability problems.
In terms of performance, the early signs from this new card look very promising indeed. If ATi can match the product with the good-quality drivers, we should be in for a very interesting end to the year as it fights with nVidia for the mid-range graphics market.
DETAILS
Price: £130Contact: ATi - no UK number
www.ati.com
See also:
The 3D Prophet 9000 Pro promises to give you more bang for your buck. 05 Sep 2002
A mainstream graphics card using nVidia's GeForce4 MX440 chipset. 29 May 2002All Graphics Cards
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