ATI is not a company whose products I've ever really salivated over. Lame drivers killed perfectly good products, but this Canadian graphics chip company sat around; seemingly twiddling its collective thumbs. The first ATI card I had was an Xpert 98, and I found out how lame that thing was once I got a real graphics card: a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP--which I still have. The next ATI product I tried out was the Radeon 32MB DDR AGP, and seeing the dismal performance of this card in comparison with a Voodoo 4 4500, I'd vowed never to touch another ATI product unless they could fix their Achilles heel: Drivers! I thought that had the same chance as hell freezing over. Now, it seems that Satan may be taking out a jacket at the very least. Okay, you get my point; ATI hasn't had the best track record in driver-land. Fortunately, someone in ATI's marketing section had the idea that--get ready for this--people like working drivers and good support. My personal opinion is that ATI has the power to walk all over NVIDIA’s offerings, but have shot themselves in the foot with awful drivers. It's no secret ATI has said they are committed to unified drivers, and new drivers about once every month. So far, they're getting there, and are pretty close. That's good, because NVIDIA is not going to sit around and wait for ATI to catch up. NVIDIA already has NV25 in the works to keep their dominance over ATI, and ATI can't afford to choke on driver support now. Enough of all that, ATI is back for round 2 with the Radeon 7500 and the flagship Radeon 8500. For all points and purposes, the 7500 and the 7x00 series are just renamed versions of the original Radeon line-up. The 8500 is a whole new core, R200, which should mean any problems associated with the original Radeon won't be present. It better be, as this is the last straw for ATI to prove them as worthy of my hard-earned cash. (Yes, I do work). The Radeon 8500 is a direct competitor to the GeForce 3 and GeForce 3 Titanium 500 (GF3 Ti500). The 8500 is the underdog here in terms of general expectations overall, and if this fails to live up, ATI will be hurting. I guess I should give a rundown of the card that's competing with the GF3 Ti500. Radeon 8500 specs: -R200 GPU @ 250MHz -64MB DDR SDRAM @ 2250MHz -Hydravision support for dual -monitor configuration -DVD decoding via ATI Rage Theatre -SVGA, DVI, and S-Video out -1x/2x/4x AGP support A few things to note: I have the OEM version which is clocked 250/250, but that's easily overcome with a little overclocking to bring it up to speed, so to speak. The second is that the SVGA output is in the middle of the outputs on the 8500. Don't confuse it with the 7500 which has the DVI in the middle instead. We all know this is going to be a fast card, so I'm going to hold up on the benchmarks. ATI touts their DVD decoding as a major feature of their cards. No offence to ATI, but I can't tell a difference. With the speed of CPU's and graphics cards today, hardware decoding isn't really as big as it used to be. I'm sure if you had a 300MHz Pentium II with the 8500 it'd be more effective, but who in their right mind would pair that up? No bother, I'm just saying that DVD decoding isn't all that and then some like ATI would like you to believe. The good news is that it does lessen the strain on your CPU. Again, you're probably not doing anything else when watching a DVD on your PC. Oh, well... Speaking of DVD playback, it's good, make no mistake about that. The ATI Multimedia Centre (MMC) and the DVD player worked flawlessly in my informal tests. No BSOD's, lockups, freezes, and other "fun" stuff like that, just pure geek bliss in this department. Once I figured out the Hydravision setup, I watch the hilarious Space balls DVD on the 32" Toshiba TV conveniently located near the PC. Every so often I did notice a slight hiccup in playback, but that may not be ATI's fault. It could be the DVD lens being dirty, or the transitions, but who am I to complain: it works great! Hydravision. Dual monitor setups were a new experience for me, and ended up being a unique little hell for me. This does work very well once you know what you're doing. While Matrox may beat ATI in the robustness of features, ATI's use of Hydravision is wonderful. You can clone or extend your desktop over to a second monitor. You can also apparently have the SVGA, DVI, and S-Video in use, provided one of these outputs is a clone of the other two. Gaming was excellent. No problems playing anything. Unreal Tournament was incredibly fast, and ATI has had problems with UT in the past. Serious Sam, something the Radeon line had trouble with originally ran beautifully. I didn't go through a whole game library that I don't have, but so far I've been blow away by ATI's comeback. My only question for ATI is "Where was this performance last year?!" ATI has nearly done a 180 degree turnaround in driver and software support by making sure the stuff works before shipping it out. Well, I guess it's time to bring up the old' benchmarking software. Specs, please: Abit VP6, WK BIOS 2x Pentium III 800EB (6.0x133) 384MB PC133 CAS3 (3x128MB), Turbo in BIOS 2x IBM 60GXP 40GB ATA100 7200RPM in RAID 0 Highpoint HPT370 ATA100/RAID controller (onboard) Radeon 8500 AGP (3286 BETA drivers) Realtek 8129 10/100NIC Guillemot Maxi Sound Fortissimo SIIG IEEE1394 Windows XP Professional 2600 AGP 4x enabled, AGP drive strength set to default. *Note: Unless an application is specifically coded for SMP, it will not use both CPU's in a dual-, or greater, CPU configuration. The only SMP capable benchmark is Quake 3. Benchmarking software: Vulpine GL, Mad Onion's 3D Mark 2000/ 2001, and, of course, Id Software's Quake 3 Demo 1.11. 3DMark 2000/ 3DMark 2001 While 3DMark 2000 is sort of old, it still is a good benchmark for DirectX 7. It is friendlier to those with a faster CPU and high front-side bus speeds. DirectX 8.0/8.1 cards, like the Radeon 8500 and the GeForce 3 line, are better benchmarked by 3DMark 2001. If the scores look a tad low, blame it on the CPU. 800MHz is barely on the low end anymore, and simply too "slow" to really push the Radeon 8500. As 3DMark 2000/2001 do not take advantage of the 2nd CPU, you won't see any performance boost from two of them. The results, ladies and gentle-nerds, are of the 32-bit colour variety, as ATI has thrown 16-bit in the back seat for 32-bit rendering.:-D View Image I personally think the 3D Mark 2000 scores are too low, even with the CPU behind it. It could be a driver issue, but it could very well be my CPU. Again, who really cares? This is pretty darn fast to me in 32-bit for either benchmarking. Vulpine GL Vulpine GL is an OpenGL benchmark. It's designed to slap the brand spanking' new video card silly. As you can see, that's just what it did to the Radeon 8500. View Image As seen here, the average FPS doesn't change at all between these resolutions, and the maximum FPS is only a 4 FPS difference between the two resolutions. Wahoo! I'm not sure how much CPU scaling would play into this, but I don't think it would hurt. Quake 3 I'll be honest: I don't like Quake 3 or the Quake series for that matter. However, Quake 3 is a much better benchmark for the video card than Unreal and Unreal Tournament games, which I like much better. Unreal and UT are better suited to CPU power than GPU power, and that's not what's being tested. I'd also like to point out that the drivers used are NOT ATI's Quake 3 optimized Radeon 8500 drivers, so a fair and accurate benchmark should be held here. Settings were 32-bit colour, detail set to max, sound off. View Image We're not talking about a major difference in scores here. A difference of 3.7 fps between these resolutions is unnoticeable. Even with the CPU behind it, these are very good scores. (Now that I found out how to correctly benchmark with Quake 3, things turn out better.) It's not as bad as it looks, and at these speeds, you're not going to notice. I sure didn't. Final Thoughts Well, the latest drivers from ATI, even in unofficial form, are remarkable! While they are few, I do have some minor complaints. First, ATI's OpenGL performance is not the greatest on VulpineGL, though the Guru of 3D's Radeon 8500 review did suggest that this benchmark favours NVIDIA cards. The other, and software related was DVD. Though it was smooth, I did notice a slight hiccup every now and then. I'm not sure if it's with the transition from chapter to chapter, but I do believe it's something with ATI's DVD player. Overclocking: I know you overclocking fiends will go batty if I neglected this part. I got my 8500 up to 275/275 immediately with 1% artifacting. I've heard of people flashing the 8500 OEM's BIOS to the normal 8500 275/275, but I'm not that prepared to try that myself. There are some things I won't do to overclock. If you want to, be my guest, but do realize you could hose your investment. That would suck to be you. For overclocking, I would suggest Power Strip, because it's the only GPU over clocker I could get my hands on that worked. There are other overclocking utilities that can do the same thing and specifically for the Radeon's, but I haven't had any luck making them work. ATI has an amazing product here. Unfortunately, it has obtained a mob of unhappy users. Read my lips: The Radeon 8500 is excellent, despite the dismal past of ATI's drivers. This is simply one heck of a video card, and, in my opinion, is a better choice than the GeForce 3 Ti500. Granted the drivers could use some work still, but it's just the minor details at this point. Unlike NVIDIA cards, ATI has dual-display on their high-end products, which is where this sort of stuff ought to be. I hope that ATI will continue with this sort of driver performance because they have a lot of people to win back. Highs: -Dual Display standard -Solid drivers -Hardware DVD decoding -Cheaper than the GeForce 3 Ti500 -On par with GF3Ti500 Lows: -OpenGL is a tad weak -ATI's DVD player hiccups -Poor drivers in the past Rating : 4.9 out of 5
