ATI had held the lead for a while with the Radeon 8500 but Nvidia retook the performance crown with the launch of the GeForce 4 Ti line.

ATI, perhaps mindful of what had happened to 3dfx when they took focus off their Rampage processor, abandoned it in favor of finishing off their next-generation R300 card.

This proved to be a wise move, as it enabled ATI to take the lead in development for the first time instead of trailing NVIDIA.

However, refined design and manufacturing techniques enabled a doubling of transistor count and a significant clock speed gain.

One major change with the manufacturing of the core was the use of the flip-chip packaging, a technology not used previously on video cards.

Despite that, the Radeon 9700 PRO was clocked significantly higher than the Matrox Parhelia 512, a card released but months before R300 and considered to be the pinnacle of graphics chip manufacturing (with 80 million transistors at 220 MHz), up until R300's arrival.

The demo was a real-time implementation of noted 3D graphics researcher Paul Debevec's paper on the topic of high dynamic range rendering.

This trade-off in precision offered the best combination of transistor usage and image quality for the manufacturing process at the time.

Matrox had released their Parhelia 512 several months earlier, but this board did not show great gains with its 256-bit bus.

The demands of the 8x1 architecture required more bandwidth than the 128-bit bus designs of the previous generation due to having double the texture and pixel fillrate.

id Software technical director John Carmack had the Radeon 9700 run the E3 Doom 3 demonstration.

ATI only intended for the 9500 series to be a temporary solution to fill the gap for the 2002 Christmas season, prior to the release of the 9600.

These were R300s with higher clock speeds, and improvements to the shader units and memory controller which enhanced anti-aliasing performance.

They were designed to maintain a performance lead over the recently launched GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, which it managed to do without difficulty.

The other two variants were the 9800, which was simply a lower-clocked 9800 Pro, and the 9800 SE, which had half the pixel processing units disabled (could sometimes be enabled again).

While the 9600 series was less powerful than the 9500 and 9500 Pro it replaced, it did largely manage to maintain the 9500's lead over NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, and it was ATI's cost-effective answer to the long-time mainstream performance board, GeForce4 Ti 4200.

Being the first laptop chip to offer DirectX 9.0 shaders, it enjoyed the same success of the previous Mobility Radeons.

The company developing that memory went bankrupt and the RAM never arrived, so ATI was forced to use regular DDR SDRAM.

The 9600 SE was ATI's answer to NVIDIA's GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, managing to outperform the 5200 while also being cheaper.

It was not until the R420 generation's Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition, in December 2004, that ATI would adopt an official dual-slot cooling design.

These were very popular for Dell and other OEM companies to sell in various configurations; connectors: DVI vs. DMS-59, card height: full-height vs. half-height.