6. Conclusion: No Surprise, A Substantial Lead For ATI In Many Tests

The Mobility Radeon 9600 is quite an achievement for ATI. Certainly, it can't reach the performance heights of a desktop counterpart, but it is ahead of the Mobility Radeon 9000. (In fact, in some areas we would estimate it to be far ahead of the Mobility Radeon 9000!) This gives it the potential to be the fastest mobile graphics solution available.

What is perhaps more impressive is that, at least at the 1280 x 1024 resolution, many games (especially those older, top-shelf games) will be quite playable with the 2X AA turned on, which is really a first for mobile graphics in general. While these additional quality modes have been available before, being able to make serious use of them has always been more of an issue because of the slower performance of the mobile parts.

Although we have become spoiled in many ways by the incredible performance of desktop cards, it is clear that mobile products continue to make significant strides in performance, as well. Currently, which company holds the mobile graphics crown is still very much an unknown, as we have been unable to get the Nvidia GeForceFX Go 5600 for testing. Only a true side by side comparison will tell who the ultimate performance winner will be.

Although, we didn't haave a final system on which to test the Mobility Radeon 9600, clearly the mobile GPU technology has excellent potential and doesn't cut a bad number in our preliminary testing. The Mobility Radeon 9600 is clearly the best of what of what we have tested so far, and offers better performance than ATI's previous generation mobile GPU.