Review Or Lose – Hectic Times 8500
This Radeon 8500 Review will be a bit shorter than usual, as it was written in very short time. ATi supplied the review units very late, which barely left me enough time to run a satisfactory number of benchmarks. So we do away with long blurbs about ATi’s history and future prospects or its competition with archenemy NVIDIA. We simply focus on the facts.
Facts Only
Let’s start with a few details of Radeon 8500:
- ATi announced Radeon 8500 on October 9, 2001, and claimed that the cards are shipping, but at this time nobody of the press had even seen a sample.
“ATI Technologies Inc. (TSE:ATY, NASDAQ: ATYT), a world leader in the supply of graphics, video and multimedia solutions, announced today that the RADEON(tm) 8500 graphics board, the world’s fastest and most technologically advanced graphics board available, and the foundation for ground-breaking visual effects, is shipping to retail outlets worldwide at a manufacturers’ suggested retail price (MSRP) of just (US) $299.” - Suggested Retail Price of Radeon 8500 is $299, which is $50 less than NVIDIA’s GeForce3 Ti500.
- Core clock is 275 MHz
- Memory clock is 550 MHz (DDR)
- Memory used is 3.6 ns DDR SDRAM, which is specified up to 277.8 MHz and thus running within spec.
- The current driver set 4.13.7191 for Radeon 8500 does not support SmoothVision, ATi’s multi sampling FSAA solution, but only the old super sampling FSAA instead, which allows only inferior FSAA performance. In fact, SmoothVision has not yet been enabled in any driver, but it is supposed to be added by the end of this month.
- The current driver is known to have issues with Athlon systems, but is supposed to run fine with Pentium 4 systems.
- Tests showed that the new WindowsXP-driver does not perform stable. It is also showing inferior 3D-performance compared to Win9x or Win2000.
- Testing the advanced features of Radeon 8500 with the DX8 vertex/pixel shader OpenGL demo programs “Dronez” or “GLMark” is not possible or sensible, because both programs are using NVIDIA-specific extensions that only work on NVIDIA’s GeForce3 family of 3D-cards. This allows Radeon 8500 to only run in DX7 mode, which is not very helpful for comparison purposes.
- Radeon 8500 comes with superior support of two displays (“Hydravision“), while NVIDIA does not equip their high-end cards with such a feature.
- ATI’s excellent hardware MPEG2-decoding/encoding support is world-renowned. It is still offering the best DVD-playback and other video capabilities in the market.
Facts Only, Continued
Here’s a quick comparison of the Radeon 8500 with its competitors from NVIDIA:
| Radeon 8500 | GeForce3 Ti500 | GeForce3 | GeForce3 Ti200 | |
| Engine | Programmable T&L (ATi “Charisma Engine II“) | Programmable T&L (“vertex & pixel shader“) | Programmable T&L (“vertex & pixel shader“) | Programmable T&L (“vertex & pixel shader“) |
| Core Clock | 275 MHz | 240 MHz | 200 MHz | 175 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 550 MHz | 500 MHz | 460 MHz | 400 MHz |
| Theoretical Peak Pixel Fill Rate | 1100 Mpixel/s | 960 Mpixel/s | 800 Mpixel/s | 700 Mpixel/s |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth | 8800 MB/s (plus “HyperZ II“) | 8000 MB/s (plus “light speed memory architecture“) | 7360 MB/s (plus “light speed memory architecture“) | 6400 MB/s (plus “light speed memory architecture“) |
| Typical Memory Configuration | 64 MB DDR SDRAM | 64 MB DDR SDRAM | 64 MB DDR SDRAM | 64 MB DDR SDRAM |
Radeon 8500 comes with superior memory bandwidth as well as theoretical fill rate, the historically most important figures to estimate 3D-performance of a graphics card.
Here’s the same for Radeon 7500:
| Radeon 7500 | GeForce2 Ultra | GeForce2 Ti | GeForce2 Pro | |
| Engine | Fixed Function T&L | Fixed Function T&L | Fixed Function T&L | Fixed Function T&L |
| Core Clock | 290 MHz | 250 MHz | 250 MHz | 200 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 460 MHz | 460 MHz | 400 MHz | 400 MHz |
| Theoretical Peak Pixel Fill Rate | 580 Mpixel/s | 1000 Mpixel/s | 1000 Mpixel/s | 800 Mpixel/s |
| Peak Memory Bandwidth | 7360 MB/s | 7360 MB/s | 6400 MB/s | 6400 MB/s |
| Typical Memory Configuration | 64 MB DDR SDRAM | 64 MB DDR SDRAM | 64 MB DDR SDRAM | 64 MB DDR SDRAM |
Radeon 7500 may have a lower theoretical fill rate than the rest, but the much more important memory bandwidth is on par with the good old GeForce2 Ultra and clearly superior to other GeForce2 cards.
Benchmark Setup
We did not test FSAA, since we don’t see any sense in testing the currently used inferior super sampling FSAA solution of Radeon 8500. Once ‘SmoothVision‘ has been enabled in upcoming drivers, we will retest the cards.
| Test Setup | |
| Processor | Intel Pentium 4 2 GHz, Socket423 |
| Motherboard | Asus P4T, BIOS 1005 |
| Memory | 256 MB Infineon PC800 RDRAM |
| Network Card | 3Com 3C905B-TX, 100 Mbit |
| Hard Drive | IBM DTLA-307030, ATA100, 7200 RPM |
| Drivers | |
| ATi Radeon 8500 Driver | 4.13.7191 |
| ATi Radeon 7500 Driver | 4.13.7189 |
| NVIDIA Video Card Driver | DetonatorXP, rev. 21.85 |
| Software and Settings | |
| Operating System | WindowsME |
| Monitor Refresh Rates | 85 Hz at all resolutions |
| Unreal Tournament | Revision 4.36, benchmark.dem Demo, very high quality ‘preferences’ settings, D3D renderer |
| AquaMark | Revision 2.2 |
| Quake 3 Arena | Retail version 1.11 |
A – Synthetic Numbers
It starts well for Radeon 8500 as well as for Radeon 7500. Both are winning their leagues in 3D Mark 2001.
A look at the real fill rate shows that Radeon 8500 is well ahead of NVIDIA’s flagship GeForce3 Ti500. The same is valid for Radeon 7500, which is able to beat all GeForce2 versions.
It is still very questionable how much real-world value these numbers represent, but ATi will be happy to see how badly the programmable Charisma II T&L-engine of Radeon 8500 is beating all NVIDIA’s GeForce3 chips.
B – Game Scores
In this benchmark Radeon 8500 is able to shine at the low-detail setting only, while the high-detail setting is putting all DX8.x cards on the same level.
Dragothic seems to be a pro-ATi benchmark. Radeon 7500 as well as Radeon 8500 are able to outclass the competition.
The Lobby-Demo paints a slightly different picture. While te Radeon cards are able to stay ahead of the competition in low-detail, Radeon 8500 falls behind GeForce3 Ti500 at the high-detail setting.
Radeon 8500 is far behind the GeForce3-competition in this DX8 benchmark. ATi says that this behavior is due to the pure DX8-optimization of ‘Nature’. MadOnion is supposedly working on a DX8.1 version, which will show Radeon 8500 in a much better light. Let’s wait and see.
B – Game Scores, Continued
In AquaMark, which takes some tweaking to run on NVIDIA-cards with DetonatorXP-drivers, Radeon 8500 and 7500 are able to score well at 1600x1200x32, while the 1024x768x32-scores aren’t quite as good.
I simply used Demo001 and was surprised that the fillrate-winner Radeon 8500 is actually falling behind GeForce3 Ti500. Radeon 8500 is clearly suffering from driver issues that slow it down.
The performance of both Radeon cards in this benchmark is clearly inferior and can only be explained with a serious driver issue. NVIDIA is having ATi for breakfast in this benchmark.
The same is unfortunately valid for Giants. The results of both Radeon cards are very disappointing.
Short Summary
An engine clock of 275 MHz and memory clock of 550 MHz plus a wealth of fancy features should be good enough to make Radeon 8500 the shining star on the3D-graphics horizon. Unfortunately, this product is held back by an inferior or at least immature driver. Low scores in a respectable number of benchmarks, the complete absence of ATi’s new ‘SmoothVision‘ FSAA solution and instabilities under WindowsXP, as reported by our close friend and partner Lars ‘Borsti’ Weinand, www.rivastation.com, are clearly tarnishing the image of ATi’s brand new flagship product.
Thankfully, Radeon comes with HydraVision as well as excellent DVD and video functions at a very attractive price of $299. This could still make Radeon 8500 a really attractive product, once the driver issues have been sorted out and ‘SmoothVision’ is working as promised. I wish I could understand why ATi didn’t wait with their October 9 announcement and asked the press to wait with final reviews until the drivers had reached a mature state. Radeon 8500 would have deserved a lot better.
For now, Radeon 8500 is definitely making NVIDIA’s life a bit harder, as it attacks the $50 more expensive GeForce3 Ti500 cards. However, as long as NVIDIA’s high-end solution is performing better in a large number of benchmarks and as long as GeForce3 Ti500 is the only of the two competitors that comes with a multi-sampling FSAA solution, NVIDIA has no major reasons to worry.
Please send in your thoughts and comments about Radeon 8500. I will incorporate them into the final version of this article.
