5. What The Mobility Radeon 9600 Brings To The Table

We already covered the features of the Mobility Radeon 9600 at the time of its launch, four months back. If you'd like to read up on the details, feel free to check out our article Mobile Graphics: DX9 on the Go .

The Mobility Radeon 9600 (M10) is the first DirectX 9 capable mobile GPU from ATi, making it the direct descendent of the Mobiliy Radeon 9000 (codename M9). With the M9, ATi brought the first DirectX 8 mobile graphics chip to the market, as well as features such as programmable vertex and pixel shaders along with it.

Without a doubt, the outstanding feature of the Mobility Radeon 9600 is its maximum core clock frequency. In the top model, the MR 9600PRO, the clock speeds are supposed to reach a full 350 MHz. The "standard" MR 9600, meanwhile, still runs at a very respectable 300/ 300 MHz (core/ mem). Later, GDDR-2M memory running at 350 MHz is supposed to give the chip an additional performance boost.

Since performance is only half the story where graphics chips for notebooks are concerned, ATi's engineers put a lot of thought into the power management of the MR9600. The fact that the chip is produced on a .13 µ process and therefore only requires 1 V during operation makes their job that much easier.

ATi has grouped its efforts to reduce power consumption, and thereby extend the notebook's running time, under the name Powerplay 4. But before we get into the details of the Powerplay functionality, let us look at another feature that, according to ATi, can be found only in the Mobility Radeon 9600: Overdrive!