ATI Radeon HD 4550 Versus EVGA GeForce 9500GT Review :: EVGA GeForce 9500GT Features

• NVIDIA G96 chip
• 65 nanometer
• 144mm2
• 314 million transistors
• 32 SPs
• 4.4 Gigapixel Fillrate
• 8.8 Gigatexel fillrate
• 8 ROPS
• PCI Express 2.0
• 512MB DDR2 memory
• 1GHz effective clocke speed
• 16GB/second memory bandwidth
• 550MHz GPU Clock
• 1375MHz Shader clock
• DirectX 10.0
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• OpenGL 2.1
• PureVideo HD
• SLI

Brand Name	EVGA
Part Number	512-P3-N954-TR
Graphics Chip	G96
Core clock	550MHz
Shader Clock	1400MHz
SPs	32
Fabrication Process	65 nm
Transistors	314 Million
Memory clock	1000MHz
Memory Interface	128-bit
Memory bandwidth	16GB/second
Memory Size	512MB
ROPs	8
Texture Filtering Units	16
Texture Filtering Rate	8.8 Gigatexels/second
HDCP Support	Yes
HDMI Support	Yes (via adapter)
Connectors	Dual-Link DVI x2, TV-Out
RAMDACs	400MHz
Bus	PCI Express 2.0
Form Factor	Single Slot
Power Connectors	N/A

The 9500GT is very similar in most respects to the 8600GTS card from last year. In point of fact, the cards are identical in every way in terms of SPs, ROPs, Fillrate and every other metric except for memory bandwidth. NVIDIA has done this before with the release of the 9600GSO which is an 8800GS rebranded to the 9 series.

The 9500GT has 32 Stream Processors, with 8 ROPs (Outputted Pixels). The card has a fillrate of 4.4 Gigapixels/second and a texturing fill rate of 8.8 Gigapixels/second. 9500GT is based upon TSMC’s 65 nanometer process with 314 million transistors. EVGA’s 9500GT has a Core clock of 550MHz, a Shader Clock of 1375MHz, and a memory clock of 500MHz (1GHz effective). EVGA’s card is outfitted with 512MB of GDDR2 memory and it’s currently available for $49.99 after $15 rebate, making it in line with ATI’s HD 4550 in terms of price.

NVIDIA was the first to the market with support for DirectX 10.0 on their cards. DirectX 10.0 introduced the concept of Unified shaders to DirectX, Pixel Shader 4.0, Vertex Shader 4.0, Geometry Shaders and instancing into the graphics API. NVIDIA cards do not support DirectX 10.1 which ATI cards and S3 cards support, but there are no current games that require DirectX 10.1.

PureVideo HD is NVIDIA’s multimedia software and hardware to play High Definition content. It has the ability to run two HD streams simultaneously (Picture in Picture) and has many features like Color Enhancement technology and more. NVIDIA’s 9500GT has hardware video encoder built-in. NVIDIA’s driver interface is cooler than ATI’s in some ways as the driver Control Panel has a drop-down menu to change each setting.

Here’s NVIDIA’s current lineup from top to bottom