ATi got it right with the Radeon 9700 Pro VPU as it dominated the graphics card market for more than half a year. Even the GeForce4 Ti4600 which was once such a strong product couldnt bare the might of the 9700 Pro. As time progressed NVIDIA soon found even their next generation GPU would struggle against the Radeon 9700 Pro VPU as the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra was scraped and soon replaced by the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra. During the reign of the Radeon 9700 Pro ATi had just one other mainstream card which was the Radeon 9500 Pro. This card was aimed to help ATi cover more of the market as the 9500 Pro was designed to act as a low cost solution. Towards the end of the Radeon 9700 Pros dominant life ATi released a few more of these budget cards.

With ATis Radeon 9700 Pro VPU still leading them to victory six months down the track it left us wondering what was next. What would ATi produce to compete with upcoming solutions from NVIDIA? Due to the huge success of the Radeon 9700 Pro in the gaming industry it made sense that ATi decided that they would stick with this winning formula. Therefore the new Radeon 9800 Pro based on the R350 is really no more than a new tweaked revision of the R300 core. With the new Radeon 9800 Pro came two other products, the Radeon 9200 Pro and Radeon 9600 Pro and of course there are the non-Pro versions.

Unfortunately, for most users these new Radeon cards have created a great deal of confusion regarding which card is suited best to a particular system. The new 9200, 9600 and 9800 cards really speak for themselves but then you also have the 9700, 9500 and 9000. Most users are unsure of whether the new 9200 is faster that the older 9500 which has a higher model number. There is also confusion regarding how much faster the 9600 is compared to the 9500 and if the 9700 is much quicker that the 9600. While this article will not answer all these questions it will clarify where the three new Radeon cards stand on a performance vs. price ratio.

After recently doing exceptionally well in our KT400A roundup Gigabyte are back, but this time not with a new motherboard. Instead I am going to check out not one but three of Gigabytes latest graphic products. Gigabyte have been a joint partner of ATi for quite some time now and enjoyed the success of the R300 core just as much as ATi did. Now they have updated their Radeon product line accordingly supporting the three new VPUs. Gigabytes new VGA Empire consists of Radeon 9800 Pro, 9600 Pro and 9200 based cards and this article has all three of them.

Already I have played around with a Radeon 9800 Pro card for quite some time as Sapphire provided me with their 9800 Pro over a month ago now. This card made gaming of all sorts dangerously addictive and I have had great deal of difficulty getting away from the gaming scene lately. Now with three more new Radeon cards it does not look like my gaming addiction is going away anytime soon.