3. Variants Of The ATI Mobility Radeon 9600

In the future, four variants of the Mobility Radeon 9600 will be built into notebooks: the simplest version will be the individual chip withouth any sort of video memory. The other three models will offer up to 128 MB of integrated video memory, so you will see the ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with:

This means that the MR9600 will be the first mobile GPU to offer 128 MB of video memory.

The Top Model: ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro

For the first time, ATI will be offering a Pro variant of the Mobility Radeon 9600 for the notebook segment. According to the manufacturer, we should expect the Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro to be available in the summer of 2003. Compared to the Mobility Radeon 9600, this model will have a higher memory and core clock (350 MHz max). The memory used here will probably be GDDR2-M with a clock rate of up to 350 MHz.

The Little Brother: ATI Mobility Radeon 9200

For the mainstream mobile segment, ATI is offering the Mobility Radeon 9200 starting now. Despite the "9" in the model name, this GPU is DirectX 8.1-compatible and is based on the technology of the Mobility Radeon 9000, which was the first GPU to support DirectX 8.1. The chip also has programmable 1.4 pixel and 1.0 vertex shaders, in addition to AGP 8x support.

As with NVIDIA's mobile GPUs, the reduced number of pixel pipelines will also cause the Radeons to suffer in some gaming situations, at least when you compare them to the big desktop models. The Mobility Radeon 9200, however, will have a real struggle competing against NVIDIA's FX Go5200, not only because it is based on the design of the old Radeon 8500's DirectX 8.1 chip, but also because it offers very slow SuperSampling FSAA.