Review: Connect3D [ATI] Radeon 9500 Pro

Card Specification

Graphics controller

• RADEON™ 9500 PRO Visual Processing Unit (VPU)
• 275 MHz engine clock

Memory configuration

• 128MB of double data rate SDRAM
• 540 MHz memory speed

Operating system support

• Windows® XP
• Windows® 2000
• Windows® Me

Display support

• VGA connector for analog CRT
• S-video or composite connector for TV/VCR
• DVI-I connector for digital CRT or flat panel
• Independent resolutions and refresh rates for any two connected displays

Features

• Eight parallel rendering pipelines
• Four parallel geometry engines
• 128-bit DDR memory interface
• AGP 8X support
• SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
• Programmable pixel and vertex shaders
• 16 textures per pass
• Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with 128-bit floating point precision
• Vertex shaders up to 1024 instructions with flow control
• Multiple render target support
• Shadow volume rendering acceleration
• High precision 10-bit per channel frame buffer support
• Supports Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 and the latest version of OpenGL®
• SMOOTHVISION™ 2.0
• 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
• Adaptive algorithm with programmable sample patterns
• 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
• Adaptive algorithm with bi-linear (performance) and tri-linear (quality) options
• HYPER Z™ III
• 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
• Lossless Z-Buffer compression (up to 24:1)
• Fast Z-Buffer Clear
• TRUFORM™ 2.0
• 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface support
• Discrete and continuous tessellation levels per polygon
• Displacement mapping
• VIDEOSHADER™
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video
• FULLSTREAM™ video de-blocking technology
• Noise removal filtering for captured video
• MPEG-2 decoding with motion compensation, iDCT and color space conversion
• All-format DTV/HDTV decoding
• YPrPb component output
• Adaptive de-interlacing and frame rate conversion
• Dual integrated display controllers
• Dual integrated 10-bit per channel 400 MHz DACs
• Integrated 165 MHz TMDS transmitter (DVI 1.0 compliant)
• Integrated TV Output support up to 1024x768 resolution
• Optimized for Pentium® 4 SSE2 and AMD Athlon™ 3Dnow!
• PC 2002 compliant