Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9500 Pro

Written by Bart Skinner on 1/27/2003 for PC  

Late last year, I took a look at a Radeon 9700 Pro from Sapphire. A power gamer’s card, the Sapphire Atlantis 9700 Pro is the top of the line video card currently but it’s also one expensive purchase. Not all of us can spend $300 on a card to play games. To meet the demand for a less expensive yet still powerful card, ATi released the 9500 line. Today we look at Sapphire’s version of the card, the Radeon 9500 Atlantis Pro.

The Sapphire Radeon 9500 Atlantis Pro is equipped with 128MB of DDR memory and features 8 rendering pipelines, 128bit memory bus, and clocked at 275MHz core speed with a 275MHz or 550DDR memory speed. The 128MB of DDR memory is comprised of eight 16MB memory chips rated at 3.6ns on both sides of the card by Hynix. As far as AGP specifications are concerned, the card supports up to AGP8X. Currently the board I am testing the card with only has AGP4X but once my new motherboard comes in, I’ll test the card with AGP 8X to see if there are any speed improvements. From the looks of the card and comparing it to shots of ATi’s version, it seems pretty identical in design.




Compared to a Radeon 9700, the card has half the memory bus width and the memory speed is a little bit faster. Other than that, the features each card has are identical. With the 9700 Pro, the Radeon 9500 Pro falls short in the same category along with being clocked slower. The clock on a 9700 Pro runs at 325MHz and the memory is at 310MHz or 620DDR. Price wise, the 9500 Pro runs around $150-$180, the 9700 is priced at $200 - $250, and the 9700 Pro comes in at a whopping $300. For the Radeon 9500 Atlantis Pro to cost the consumer almost half as much as the 9700 Pro and get good performance out of it along with DirectX 9.0 compatibility is pretty good.

Video output comes in three flavors: DVI, S-Video, and VGA. Sapphire has supplied you with a DVI->VGA converter for those of us who don’t have an LCD display. The card does support dual display utilizing Hydravision technology. Since I work with Hydravision at work, I can say that the implementation of dual display with it is pretty good. Rather than get into all the features that Hydravision has, I will just say that for dual monitor work the software does a great job.

Bundled with the card are the driver suite, Redline, and PowerDVD 4.0XP. Redline is Sapphire’s overclocking utility that lets you push the card to its limits. Besides overclocking you can turn on and off various features to adjust the card as you see fit. Cyberlink’s PowerDVD is a pretty nice software DVD player that’s bundled with a lot of cards. Unfortunately, no demos or full versions of games are included. I would’ve liked to see a game or two thrown in there but I can understand Sapphire’s decision as it probably keeps the costs down. The inclusion of a tweaking utility is a big plus and I do applaud Sapphire giving you the tool needed to push the card further.


My test system consisted of:

AMD XP 1800+
512MB PC2100 Crucial Memory
Windows XP w/ DirectX 9.0
MSI K7T266 Pro2 Motherboard
SoundBlaster Live 5.1
30GB WD 7200rpm

For drivers, I opted for the latest Catalyst version, which is version 3.0a, which were posted January 10, 2003. You can pick up the drivers here. For comparison, I threw in the results from the Geforce4 Ti4400 as that and the 9500 Pro are roughly the same price. Let’s start off with the tried and true 3DMark2001 SE from Futuremark.



As you can see, with No AA, the 9500 Pro has about a 400-500 3DMark lead on the 4400. With AA enabled, that lead increases dramatically. Now let’s see how the two cards compare with Unreal Tournament 2003 which utilizes DirectX. Thanks to HardOCP for making a benching utility for this game that makes reviewers’ lives easier. This first chart is low quality with no anti-aliasing.



As you can see the 9500 pro consistently beats the GF4 4400. The higher the resolution, the bigger the difference is.

Here is low quality with 2x anti-aliasing on.



With AA on, the leads of the 9500 pro are about the same at the lower resolutions and increase at 1600x1200 compared to No AA.

Here is low quality with 4xAA on.



Here is where the 9500 pro shines over its Nvidia competitor. 4x is actually playable on the 9500 pro at 1024 on all levels where as on the 4400 it’s not on some levels.
Here is the high quality test with NoAA.



Here we see similar results to the low quality chart. The difference is a few frames at any resolution, however the 9500 pro is consistently on top.

The next benchmark is Comanche 4 demo from Novalogic. It has scripting ability in which you can programmatically run many benchmarks in a batch. Yet another tool nice for reviewers.



Here we see in this test that there is some kind of other system bottleneck at lower resolutions, but looking at the higher resolutions, the 9500 pro pulls away from the 4400.
The last benchmark today is Medal of Honor:AA. This is an OpenGL game. ATI is notorious for having bad OpenGL implementation in their drivers. The latest set fixed a stutter bug in OpenGL games so let’s see how it does now. However to bench MoH, I had to use Fraps and a saved game from Anthony Tan over at Beyond 3d.



Here we see the 9500 pro losing 4fps to the 4400 with no AA and 2xAA, but with 4xAA it climbs over top the 4400. Notice now the 9500 only loses 3fps from no AA to 4xAA.

In conclusion, the Sapphire 9500 Pro is a great card with superb performance for its price point of around $180 for the OEM where as the GF4 4400 is around $190. I think this purchase is a no-brainer if you are looking for good performance but can’t afford the top of the line. I give this card a 9.8. It gets a higher rating than the 9700 pro due to the value of it but not a 10 due to the OpenGL performance. Maybe someday ATI can get those OpenGL drivers up to par. When that happens, look out Nvidia.