The competitors
You'll notice that we're testing the 9500 Pro against a range of cards. We've included a Radeon 9700 Pro card, plus a plain ol' Radeon 9700. The Radeon 9700 is another new card from ATI, and it's nothing more than a 9700 Pro that runs at a slightly lower clock speed and sells at a slightly lower price. That card will be interesting to watch, because its 275/540MHz clock rate is identical to the 9500 Pro's, but it has twice the memory bandwidth thanks to its quad 64-bit memory controllers. The 9500 has only two 64-bit memory controllers, so the contrast will tell us a lot about how memory bandwidth affects performance.

However, the most important matchup here—and the one to which we'll devote most of our attention—is the Radeon 9500 Pro versus the GeForce4 Ti 4200, because they're direct competitors. You'll note that we're using the new AGP 8X-capable version of the GF4 Ti 4200. (The 9500 Pro supports AGP 8X, too.) This card has 128MB of memory, and it runs at core and memory clock speeds of 275MHz and 512MHz, respectively. This is the card the 9500 Pro has to beat in order to fulfill its mission.

Finally, remember that we're stuck once again reviewing an R300-based product with DirectX 8-class applications, at best. The 9500 Pro will be most impressive when it can make use of its floating-point color precision and the like, but the software to benchmark performance with FP color just isn't here yet. We'll be testing the 9500 Pro as most folks will have to use it for the time being: as a DX8-class chip.

Fill rate
Graphics performance very often comes down to pixel-pushing power at the end of the day, and this kind of power (fill rate) is generally a function of some basics of chip design and clock speed. The table below shows the key capacities and clock rates of the most common new GPUs, so you can see where the 9500 Pro fits in.

The 9500 Pro looks a little different from the older chip designs above, because it has eight pixel pipelines capable of laying down only one texture per rendering pass each. By contrast, the GF4 Ti 4200 has a four-pipe design with two texture units per pipe. This important difference gives the 9500 Pro twice the pixel fill rate of the Ti 4200. All told, the 9500 Pro has higher pixel and texel fill rates than the Ti 4200, and more memory bandwidth, as well.

Here's how the numbers translate into performance in 3DMark's synthetic fill rate tests.

The 9500 Pro beats the Ti 4200 by a fairly small margin in both pixel and texel fill rate tests. Notice how much slower the 9500 Pro is than the Radeon 9700 in the single-textured test. No doubt the 9500 Pro's lesser memory bandwidth is holding it back here. However, the 9500 Pro ties with the identically clocked Radeon 9700 in the multitexturing test.

Here are our results for 1280x1024 resolution compared to the chips' theoretical peak fill rates.

The 9500 Pro proves to be very efficient with multi-texturing, as are all of the cards.