Performance Check: RADEON 8500

RADEON 8500

Overview

3,6ns Memory

Lots of components

The whole excitement about ATi’s next-generation RADEON started this summer. One white-paper after another was released, with ever more fascinating promises. All in all, it looked like there was good reason to hope that NVIDIA would soon get some serious competition for the performance crown the company has held on to so tightly in the recent past. Then, suddenly, no more was heard of this intriguing card.

Now, just as suddenly, here it is – the RADEON 8500. Too suddenly for my taste. The review samples were made available to testers on Monday, with a suggested publication date of Tuesday. Less than 24 hours time to get at least a half-way decent first review out the door. Almost impossible. Almost. But who needs sleep? ;-)

So, I’ll cut right to the chase and get to the question first and foremost on everyone’s mind: How does the RADEON 8500 compare to the GeForce 3 Ti500?

Graphic cards compared
Chip Name	RADEON 7500	RADEON 8500	GeForce 3 Ti 200	GeForce 3 Ti 500
Core	RV200	R200	NV 20	NV 20
Manuf. Process	0.15 Micron	0.15 Micron	0.15 Micron	0.15 Micron
Chipclock	290 MHz	275 MHz	175 MHz	240 MHz
Memory Speed	460 MHz (DDR)	550 MHz (DDR)	400 MHz (DDR)	500 MHz (DDR)
Memory Type	SDRAM	SDRAM	SDRAM	SDRAM
Memory Bus	128Bit DDR	128Bit DDR	128Bit DDR	128Bit DDR
Memory Size	64 MB	64 MB	64 MB	64 MB
RAMDAC (S)	350/350 MHz	400/400 MHz	350 MHz	350 MHz
DualDisplay	YES	YES	-	-
Businterface	AGP 1x/2x/4x	AGP 2x/4x	AGP 1x/2x/4x	AGP 1x/2x/4x
T&L	YES	YES	YES	YES
DirectX Generation	DX7	DX8	DX8	DX8
Pixel Shader	-	YES	YES	YES
Vertex Shader	-	YES	YES	YES
Render Pipelines	2	4	4	4
Teturen per Pipe	3	3	2	2

Student Driver

Unfortunately the currently shipping drivers make a pretty unfinished impression. Instead of SmoothVision anti aliasing, the drivers only support the older (and slower) SuperSampling method. The stability of the Windows XP driver left much to be desired, as did its performance. The "Nature Test" in 3DMark2001 would regularly reboot the computer it was run on. Interestingly, this problem did not occur on a Pentium 4 under Windows XP. 3DMark2000, on the other hand, required up to 5 tries to complete even one successful run under Windows XP (with both CPU´s), as it kept exiting to the Windows desktop. This happened both on the Pentium 4 and the Athlon.

The following results were obtained on my Athlon system. If you’d like to see some P4 results, I suggest taking a look at the article at Tom´s Hardware Guide.

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