A few weeks ago ATI announced the full range of products based on Radeon 9700 Pro's R300 chip, however reviews have been few and far between as yet. Today Beyond3D lifts the lid in the low end DX9 contender courtesy of Sapphire and their Atlantis Radeon 9500.

With a pixel fill rate the same as the low end Radeon 9000 PRO, but a geometry equivalent to the Radeon 9700 how does the performance of this part stack up?

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In comparison to the 9000 PRO though, it seems that 9500 can keep a nice little performance gain over all resolutions. This is probably in part to the extra geometry throughput of the 9500, but it could also be due to the fact that 9500's 'HYPER-Z III' bandwidth saving scheme can do early rejection of occluded pixels that weren't already rejected by the hierarchical Z-buffer.

Sapphire ATLANTIS Radeon 9500 Review @ Beyond3D