To Nathan Davis, a misnomer isn't just someone who loses garden ornaments.
Based on the 9200 series, the 9250 has programmable hardware DirectX 8.1 pixel/vertex shaders - no DirectX 9.0 - sports a lowly four pixel pipelines and a core of 240MHz. With a minimalist design in mind, the only notable features of this particular card are D-sub, DVI and composite out with a passive heatsink.
With eight modules worth of 256MB 5ns TSOP memory, although TSOP memory is slowly phasing out, their speed fits perfectly on low-end cards such as this and keeps the price stumpy.
The gameplay ability of this card is useable at best. Spitting out 35.1 frames in our Call of Duty time demo, it sits just above the performance vicinity of a GeForce FX5600. With Doom 3, it's inherently obvious that the card benefits from the large memory without a huge hit on processing performance. It's unplayable at 1024 x 768, even in low detail - with the GPU in overtime for higher resolutions - but the differences in performance between a playable high quality 800 x 600 (averaging 21fps) and low quality (25fps) were surprisingly meagre. Not too shabby for a low-end budget card, but we wouldn't recommend this card for a gaming platform.
It sports a 128-bit memory bus - however there are also 64-bit and 128MB variants of this chip. Unless it is amazingly to be used for performance gaming, 256MB is seemingly overkill for a budget card.
What really concerned us was that the stock 240MHz core heats up to a worrying point of digitburning. Considering the passive cooling, this card certainly wasn't built for overclocking and the 5ns modules are already running at full speed (400MHz).
If you're planning on using a home theatre box as a recording station, you'll want to choose a VIVO variant, but otherwise the 9250 is simply a faster alternative to current onboard video.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012