The Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB has the same 380-MHz core clock speed and a total of 700 MHz in the memory clock. The jump in memory improves the handling of high-resolution textures and environments, the company says.

Graphics board makers have downplayed the role that memory plays in handling 3D graphics in recent years. But they've also been racing to be first to ship a consumer board with a quarter gig of memory.

Archrival NVidia's GeForce FX 5600 will support either 128 or 256MB of memory, but the larger version has been scarce, so ATI says the race is still on.

ATI defines enthusiast users as those who play games more than 16 hours weekly. They're often the early adopters who want their games to run at the highest level of performance possible.

One significant difference is that the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB moves to DDR-2 memory; the 128MB version of the Radeon 9800 Pro uses only normal DDR memory. This gives the newer card its 700-MHz memory clock speed.

By: DocMemory
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