Radeons 9000 chip to be budget card!

[FthrJACK]

The new Radeon 9000 and 9000 pro are basically reworked radeon 8500's, there are some slight changes but essentially the 9000 is the same as a 8500, but cheaper to produce. Unlike most "value" chips, the RV250 has four pixel pipelines, and like the 8500, it has both vertex and pixel shaders in hardware. To keep costs down, ATI replaced the 8500's dual vertex shaders with a single, optimized vertex shader unit. Also, the chip has one fewer texture unit per pixel pipeline; to compensate, it can "loop back" pixels to apply additional textures a full six times per rendering pass. The 8500 has dual texture units per pipe and can loop back up to three times to apply additional textures. So the Radeon 9000 delivers just as many textures per rendering pass, but only half the textures per clock cycle.

In addition to these changes, the Radeon 9000 gets an updated motion video processing unit. This update is important because the chip can apply pixel shaders effects to real-time video.

This means that ATI can market the card for an impressive $129 for the 9000 PRO model. (clock speed of 275mhz and 550mhz ram)

you heard me, $129!!

The slower 9000 will be $109 ( with clock speeds of 200mhz and 400mhz)

Time to throw that old geforce 2 in the bin? and send your Geforce 4 mx 400 after it?

[Snoop]

but radeon 8500's are faster than them and u can pick them up for less than 100$ in america.