ATI's Radeon 9600 Pro - Another Win for ATI

Final Words

Given the specifications of the GPU, the Radeon 9600 Pro performed quite in line with what we expected. If you recall our conclusion to the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra piece we stated:

"One thing is for sure, current Radeon 9500 Pro owners should stick with their cards, and if you can find one, it's not a bad buy."

The Radeon 9500 Pro is still the best performing solution out there in this price range, however the production run was quite limited and you won't be able to find those cards to be too available in the future so grab them while you can.

Between the Radeon 9600 Pro and the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, the performance of the two offerings is relatively close; however, the few cases where the GeForce FX performed the worst out of our roundup of cards and the lesser image quality offered by the part push our recommendation towards the Radeon 9600 Pro.

The release of the Radeon 9600 Pro marks a very important step in ATI's growth as a company, this is the first time that we've been able to recommend not only a high-end ATI GPU but also a mainstream GPU over NVIDIA's offerings. It's clear that ATI as a company has truly turned around from the days of the Radeon 8500 and we can only hope that the job-well-done will continue. ATI should not rejoice just yet however, the NVIDIA camp is definitely quite frustrated and will not take kindly to this sort of competition - vengeance is definitely brewing, only time will tell if it's enough to fuel reclamation of the the crown.

If we tally up ATI's wins (Radeon 9700 Pro, Radeon 9800 Pro, and now the Radeon 9600 Pro), the scoreboard is ATI - 3, NVIDIA - 0; but the game is far from over.