Mistakenly, Power Color, one of ATI's strongest partners, posted early information about the card that will be on the shelves for Christmas The Radeon 9500, already pre-announced at the Radeon 9700 Pro launch. Of course, since it's based on the same R300 core, Radeon 9500 will have full support for DirectX 9.
Even we were expecting that ATI would cripple the number of pipelines from eight to four. But this will not happen, as someone decided that the core will be the same. So this card will have eight pipelines and the chip will be no different than the current Radeon 9700 Pro.
Anyway, we can assume that this card will have a lower core clock, even lower than 300 since that is the number for the Radeon 9700 non Pro. The biggest thing is the different memory interface where you will have 128 Bit memory interface that and use 64 MB of DDR memory clocked at 550 MHz, which is a bit lower than the 9700 Pro frequency.
The card will also have controversial AGP 8X support that does not function well in some configurations, but hopefully for ATI it will work flawlessly by the times these cards are launched.
ATI will have the only DirectX 9 mainstream part, with price less than $200, at least until the NV30 derivative arrives, hopefully later this year.
News source: The Inquirer
