ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Performance at Higher Resolutions

ATI's impressive performance in the previous AA tests made us wonder if we needed to increase the resolution beyond 1024 x 768 x 32 in order to let the Radeon 8500 truly show its performance advantages.  We picked Quake III Arena, a benchmark that the Radeon 8500 did relatively well in and took the resolution up from 640 x 480 all the way through 1600 x 1200. 

Here are the results:

Had it not been for NVIDIA's release of their Detonator 4 drivers then ATI would be slightly faster than the GeForce3 at 1600 x 1200.  NVIDIA was definitely playing their cards properly in this one and it did catch ATI off guard. 

Even at higher resolutions the Radeon 8500 is not able to come forth and outperform the GeForce3; ATI engineers must be very irritated at this point that their baby was shown to the world prematurely.