I've read alot of contradictory posts regarding SoftR9700 and Radeon 9500 Pros, and wanted to throw my 2 bits into the fray. I have a retail box version of the Made-By-ATi Radeon 9500 Pro, and have had it overclocked since warp11 was nice enough to hack up a BIOS for us all. I should also mention that my card looks identical to the pictures of the 9500NP on the hardware hack site (inc. position of RAM, etc). Long story short, I applied the soft patch to the Jan 10th Cat 3 Drivers, and now get 2098 MTexels at stock speeds, and 2600+ overclocked to a modest 345/312. This indicates to me that I now have a fully functioning 256-bit bus...or am I completely off the mark here?
Hey Doc: I did the same thing with mine and really boosted my 3D Mark score but I've a problem with flickering artifacts during benchmark and in game play. Have you been experiencing this problem with your mod'd card? DuxRus
I actually found I had to tone down my overclocking by about 10Mhz on my memory after performing the mod, or I would get black dots flashing randomly on the screen, as well some occasional corruption in the 3d scene. Could be that the extra bandwidth sees the memory working a little harder? Now running at 305/340 (mem/chipset)
Did you use any additional cooling when you overclocked your 9500 Pro and do you know if the Sapphire 9500 Pro will work the same or not?