With all the anticipation surrounding ATI's new high-end chipset, the Radeon 9700 (previously the R300), it would be easy to overlook two new mainstream products that were available in advance of its September launch.

These new chipsets are the Radeon 9000 and 9000 Pro, and they bring a number of features from ATI's previous high-end products into the mainstream.

Although ATI no longer manufactures its own boards for UK retail distribution, we were able to obtain an early reference board using the Radeon 9000 chipset for testing.

Overall, the Radeon 9000 has a great deal in common with ATI's previous top-end chipset, the 8500.

However, there are several key differences. With cards like Hercules' 3D Prophet 9000 128MB set to retail at £119.14 (ex. VAT), this chipset will be selling against products using nVidia's high-end GeForce4 MX series or low-end GeForce4 Ti range.

There are no architectural differences between the standard and Pro versions of the 9000; one is simply clocked higher than the other. The standard part we reviewed has a core speed of 250MHz with 128MB of DDR SDRam clocked at 400MHz. The faster Pro version is set to 275MHz and 550MHz, giving a peak memory bandwidth of 8.8GBps compared to 6.6GBps.

Like the Radeon 8500, the 9000 is based on a 0.15-micron die, but has a reduced transistor count, making it less expensive to manufacture. To achieve this reduction, some of the 8500's architecture has been discarded.

The most notable change is in the texture engine, which is now down to one unit-per-pixel pipeline, rather than two.

However, this is still enough to implement ATI's Smartshader technology for programmable pixel and vertex shader effects - unlike the GeForce4 MX chipset, which has no programmable shader support - so it won't be at such a disadvantage when running DirectX 8.1-based software with advanced effects.

It also means ATI can discard the dedicated circuitry previously required for DVD playback features and replace it with a custom pixel shader, further reducing the transistor count and costs.

As you'd expect, the 9000 is a four-pipeline product, which gives it a raw fill rate of 1gigapixel per second and places it level with the GeForce4 Ti 4200.

However, the loss of a texture unit puts it at a disadvantage against the GeForce4 Ti 4200, which can process eight textures per pipe, compared to the Radeon 9000's six. The same optimisation routines introduced with earlier Radeon chipsets have been maintained, including HyperZ II, which uses Z-buffer compression, occlusion and culling routines.

You also get ATI's version of full-scene anti-aliasing, known as SmoothVision. This is a multisampling technique that's not as highly optimised as Matrox's new fragment anti-aliasing, but does reduce the amount of bandwidth required by only sampling the texture data in the scene once.

Dual 350MHz RAMDACs and HydraVision drivers allow dual-monitor setups and products like Hercules' 3D Prophet 9000 128MB will come with both DVI and VGA ports, as well as a seven-pin Din port for composite and S-Video output.

The key to any graphics card's success, however, is its performance and here the Radeon 9000 takes a clear lead from the GeForce4 MX chipset and brings it quite close to the more expensive GeForce4 Ti products.

nVidia has plans to update the GeForce4 MX chipset later this year, but until that happens, products featuring the Radeon 9000 chipset look well positioned to take the lead in the lucrative mainstream graphics sector.

Price: £119.14 (ex. VAT).Contact: Hercules 020-8665 1881
www.hercules-uk.comFact file

• Memory 128MB of DDR SDRAM
• Core clock 250MHz
• Memory clock 200MHz
• RAMDAC Dual 350MHz
• Connectors VGA, DVI-I, 7-pin DIN