ATI RADEON 8500 - Driven to new Heights (1/9) |
So far the introduction of ATi's RADEON 8500 has seemed more like a puzzle than a product launch. As a consequence, it's been hard to get a good general impression of this card and its potential. In early August, ATi distributed a small number of pre-production cards, but these samples were rather unconvincing and seemed far from finished (Tomīs Hardware Guide). This pre-sampling phase was followed by a veritable fireworks of whitepapers in which ATi presented its new chip, bit by bit. (More here)
Finally, the real launch took place around the middle of October, with very positive results for the most part. In some benchmarks, the card was able to beat NVIDIA's new flagship, the Ti500, by a comfortable margin. However, this victory was marred by incompatibility issues on Athlon systems as well as comparatively low Windows XP performance. The final blow came in the form of the discovery that ATi was cheating in certain benchmarks, skewing the results in their favor by unfair means. Apparently the OpenGL driver (v7191) uses a detection routine to identify the game Quake 3, triggering an undocumented manipulation of the mip map handling. While this results in noticeably higher framerates, the added speed comes at the cost of image quality, which suffers visibly. Lastly, the much-touted new SmoothVision FSAA method was also not activated in this set of drivers, which only offer SuperSampling FSAA as it was implemented in the original RADEON.
The Second Attempt Now ATi has released a new driver (v7206). This new version addresses many of the problems that were criticized in the first round of reviews: It resolves the Quake 3 "issue", offers SmoothVision FSAA and enables 16tap anisotropic filtering. On top of that it even improves performance.
|
|||||||||
Copyright: 20.11.2001 - RIVA Station 2001 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/r8500_2_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
