Date:
Friday , October 19, 2001
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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ATi's Radeon 8500 Reviewed

We decided to review our Radeon 8500 with the cutting edge AthlonXP 1.53GHz CPU as we know that AMD is the leading choice among our readers. The Radeon 8500 is the first non-NVIDIA card that we have been excited about for some time. Read on about Radeon and find out if our excitement turned to satisfaction or frustration.

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Test System:

For this article we have directly compared the Radeon 8500 to the NVIDIA Ti500 VidCard. The Radeon is selling from US$208 to US$299 at retailers while the Ti500 can be had for US$299 to US$400. There is not really a direct comparison here in pricing, as the Ti200 can be had for between US$175 to US$250 currently.

Radeon 8500 OR GeForce3 Ti500 (reference card built by VisionTek) MicroStar KT266 Pro2 v2.0, AthlonXP 1800+ / 1.53GHz, 512MB Corsair PC2400 DDR Ram, NetGear FA311 NIC, CoolerMaster CB5-6G52 HSF, Western Digital 30GB HD, Vantec Round IDE Cables, EnerMax 550 Watt PSU.

All of these benchmarks were taken on identical platforms running Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 8.0a with VIA 4n1 version 4.34 drivers installed. NVIDIA DetonatorXP driver version 21.85 and ATi driver version 5.13.01.3276.

You must take this into consideration when looking at the DirectX benchmarks (3DMark2000, 3DMark2001, and Max Payne). AGP Fast Writes was disabled for these benchmarks. We will discuss this at the end of the article. Also, anisotropic filtering was not used in these benchmarks to help keep the cards on a level playing field.

Benchmarks:

The number to the right of the VidCard name/model number is the resolution used for the test. All benchmarks were tested with 32 bit color. Vsync was disabled for all tests. 1600 = 1600x1200x32, 1280 = 1280x1024x32, 1024 = 1024x768x32.

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These benchmarks are taken using Quake 3 Arena version 1.17 and Demo001 using the QBench script which can be found at G256.com. All in all, at the Normal setting we can see that the 8500 stayed neck and neck with the Ti500 with, for argument's sake, the only difference being at 1600x1200x32. There the 8500 lagged behind the Ti500 by a paltry 11 Frames Per Second.

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With the visual settings set at almost their maximum, we see the lead spread out a bit more, especially at the higher resolutions. The Ti500 is showing dominance in Quake 3 Arena with the AthlonXP CPU.