ATI Radeon 9600 PRO vs ION 2
Primary details
GPU architecture, market segment, value for money and other general parameters compared.
| Place in the ranking | not rated | not rated |
| Place by popularity | not in top-100 | not in top-100 |
| Architecture | Tesla 2.0 (2007−2013) | Rage 8 (2002−2007) |
| GPU code name | GT218 | RV350 |
| Market segment | Desktop | Desktop |
| Release date | 3 June 2008 (16 years ago) | 1 October 2003 (21 year ago) |
Detailed specifications
General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.
| Pipelines / CUDA cores | 16 | no data |
| Core clock speed | 500 MHz | 400 MHz |
| Number of transistors | 260 million | 60 million |
| Manufacturing process technology | 40 nm | 130 nm |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 20 Watt | 18 Watt |
| Texture fill rate | 4.000 | 1.600 |
| Floating-point processing power | 0.03424 TFLOPS | no data |
| ROPs | 4 | 4 |
| TMUs | 8 | 4 |
Form factor & compatibility
Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).
| Interface | PCIe 2.0 x16 | AGP 8x |
| Width | IGP | 1-slot |
| Supplementary power connectors | no data | None |
VRAM capacity and type
Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.
| Memory type | System Shared | DDR |
| Maximum RAM amount | System Shared | 128 MB |
| Memory bus width | System Shared | 128 Bit |
| Memory clock speed | System Shared | 300 MHz |
| Memory bandwidth | no data | 9.6 GB/s |
| Shared memory | - | no data |
Connectivity and outputs
Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.
| Display Connectors | No outputs | 1x DVI, 1x VGA, 1x S-Video |
API compatibility
List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.
| DirectX | 11.1 (10_1) | 9.0 (9_0) |
| Shader Model | 4.1 | no data |
| OpenGL | 3.3 | 2.0 |
| OpenCL | 1.1 | N/A |
| Vulkan | N/A | N/A |
| CUDA | 1.2 | - |
Pros & cons summary
| Recency | 3 June 2008 | 1 October 2003 |
| Chip lithography | 40 nm | 130 nm |
| Power consumption (TDP) | 20 Watt | 18 Watt |
ION 2 has an age advantage of 4 years, and a 225% more advanced lithography process.
ATI 9600 PRO, on the other hand, has 11.1% lower power consumption.
We couldn't decide between ION 2 and Radeon 9600 PRO. We've got no test results to judge.
Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.
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