Creative Radeon 9600

Luke goes middle-of-the-road with this new Creatively-minded offering.

As a youth I wasn't to be found smoking on street corners intimidating old ladies with abuse, nor down in the park of an evening swigging cider and scoring benches. No. I was safely alone, indoors, getting all excited about printed circuit boards and silicon. Sad, isn't it? I was, more than a few years ago, more than a little into my PC gaming hardware - to the extent that even now, in my more eclectically-lifestyled days, I'm still more than a little thrilled by the prospect of a new 'bit' to stick in my machine. Something of a hangover, then, the last remaining trace of geeky-excitement that the uninitiated simply can't grasp. The sheer pleasure that comes from getting your paws on a new graphics card and watching it revolutionise your gaming experience.

I hadn't enjoyed this slightly obscure buzz for some time, but upon the arrival of this little beauty - the Creative Radeon 9600 - it all came flooding back to me. Halcyon days spent over-clocking CPUs, finding and tweaking graphics card drivers, updating OpenGL versions, patching games, serial-linking machines... pure reminiscence. Anyway, what I'm trying to say in a lengthy, convoluted and probably entirely pointless fashion is that upgrading is fun - offering not only a (hopefully) better gaming experience at the end of it - but also the satisfaction of having achieved it through your own fingers-and-screwdriver.

Ripping with glee the aged NVIDIA card formerly occupying my AGP slot from the innards of my PC, and then wrestling with the screwdrivers on the motherboard I had clumsily dislodged in the process, I found with some satisfaction that the card fitted perfectly and the machine even recognised it off-the-cuff. Wonder of wonders. I remember not so many moons ago when the installation of new hardware would inevitably result in Windows failing to acknowledge any change before crashing in a shower of misery and hugely frustrating 'No new hardware found' messages. Not today however, as the drivers provided by Creative and the 'Install new hardware' function on Windows XP collaborated in perfect harmony to lead me through the setup process. Even my dog could have installed this card; and he's more of an Apple man usually.

So setup went smoothly enough and I was immediately pleased with the options of desktop resolution now available to me - all glorious 32-bit colour. The display management software, an ATI creation I believe, is also a lot slicker than the previously basic options available - enabling me to customise and tweak every aspect of my graphical experience. So far so good. Moving on to performance then I was first tempted by the ATI demonstrations the installation process had deposited on my system. Looking first at the 'Monkey' demo, I was amazed to find myself rolling smoothly through a realistic jungle, following the path of a butterfly resplendent in vivid colours and shockingly real wing-movements. Journeying through foliage the demo then brought me face-to-face with an inquisitive young primate; complete with facial features and fur so detailed you could only tell it wasn't real by the ever-so-slightly wooden animation. I was impressed - the fur in particular looking so real you could stroke it. Pixar eat your heart out.

As you may have guessed from my child-like fascination with this new card its been quite a while since I last investigated a new gizmo of this variety - my previous Radeon having bit the dust some time back landing me instead with an old GeForce card that really wasn't up to the job any more. I was rediscovering the joy and importance of good visuals. Shallow they may be - but how greatly they add to the immersion and authenticity of an already intriguing game.

Of course, the bundled demo would only take me so far in true evaluation of the 9600 so it was to Max Payne 2 I turned - already a graphically impressive - albeit forgiving game in this day and age. Mercilessly, I upped all the detail settings even turning on the obscure features (despite not knowing the actual benefit they offered). Low and behold all was smooth, silky and looking like a million-dollars. All this on a mid-range PC (P4 2.66, 512mb RAM, etc.). So my experience so far was a good one, but how does the 9600 rack-up in competition with its most recent competitors, as opposed to the aged near-defunct collection of dust and valves I removed before it? Pretty well, all things considered.

In 3D Mark tests the 9600 generally scored similarly to the NVIDIA GeForce 5600, and 30% or so lower than the 9700 Pro - placing this card somewhere just around the middle of the road in terms of raw statistical performance. Not bad for a piece of kit that will cost you somewhere in the region of £98 online. If you don't crave the highest performance available then this card, and those like it, offer excellent value for money. Your not buying at the top-end of the market (where prices soar to around £300), but you're still enjoying performance that makes the games available at the moment, and those coming this year look and perform well. This is the beauty of buying mid-range cards such as the unashamedly-so Radeon 9600, which offers competent performance at a great price. The battle between NVIDIA and ATI will no doubt be feeding this improving consumer-value, too.

All in all then the Creative Radeon 9600 offers great build quality for a good price, partly because there are no fancy bundled games - but thankfully we still get nice extra features like a TV-out, a whopping 256mb of DDR memory, DirectX 9.0 compatibility and some next-generation nonsense too that could be useful in future products. An impressive mixture then of excellent features, but nothing so bleeding-edge as to up the price.

To conclude then I would heartily recommend this card to any gamer requiring good performance, a modicum of future-compatibility, but lacking the bucks or the inclination to opt for anything at the top-end. There are some new products from both the main manufacturers coming within the next few months, but regardless of future hardware this card should certainly be able to cope with any PC game out in the course of the year - and is even better on older games. Power users will however want to be looking elsewhere for the frame-rate bragging rights in some of the graphically beefier releases due this year, perhaps the 9800 for those with the cash?

88%

By Luke Guttridge