Ever since ATi released their Radeon 9700 Pro VPU in the summer of 2002 they've taken control of the graphics card markets. Even now ATI are still firmly in the drivers seat, despite the recent release of nVidia's GeForceFX lineup. ATi knows though that no matter how fast your high end part is, it's in the budget and mainstream markets where the war is must be won. Gigabyte (a tier one manufacturer) has been on the ATi bandwagon since the release of the Radeon 8500 line of GPU's, and today we're going to be looking at Gigabyte's mainstream Radeon 9600 Pro which is obviously based on an ATi VPU. The tiny Radeon 9600 Pro VPU is built on 0.13 micron technology instead of larger more expensive 0.15 micron like the Radeon 9500/9700/9800's. This was a smart move for ATi as it's better to experiment on the lower cost chipsets and have all the quirks worked out by the time you migrate your high end VPU's to the smaller manufacturing process. nVIDIA learned this the hard way with their GeForceFX 5800 GPU's!
