HardOCP has ATI’s new mainstream video card, the 9600XT. They run it through performance tests and look at the gaming experience delivered with this brand new video card.
Quote from the review at HardOCP:
“Even though there is a big difference between the 5600Ultra and the 9600XT, all things are not exactly perfect in the 9600XT camp. You will notice the Halo graphing is showing performance at a resolution that can be considered low for today’s games with no quality settings such as AA or AF enabled. And even at these settings the Radeon 9600XT did dip to the 20FPS mark a few times. It is situations like these that OverDrive or manual overclocking might come in handy. Still, performance was laggy at times while playing this game on both ATI cards. While “playing” Halo on the 5600Ultra was anything but playing. We had to drop to 640×480 on the 5600Ultra just to play this level at a decent frame rate which is simply a very ugly resolution to be playing on a monitor larger than 14 inches. We do not say this to berate the value of the 9600XT in any way, we just want you to remember that mainstream value does bring along with it some performance sacrifices that you need to be aware of.”
