ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Quake III Arena

One of the most reliable gaming benchmarks (its results are always repeatable and rarely vary) is Quake III Arena and it's based on an engine that is still in the news. We used the 1.29g patch and the video options set to the default High Quality settings. The resolution was adjusted and demo 'four' was run in timedemo 1 mode.

Quake III Arena High Quality - 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce3 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon 7500 ATI Radeon 64DDR STMicro Kyro II 223.7 207.5 205.2 187.3 130.6 127.3 123.1 87.0 71.6 | 0 | 45 | 89 | 134 | 179 | 224 | 268

In our original preview, Quake III Arena was one of the only benchmarks where the Radeon 8500 came close to the GeForce3 in performance. In spite of this there was still a 15% performance delta but now the Radeon 8500 comes out ahead. The GeForce3 Ti 500 is in its sights but just too far for now. The Radeon 8500 is finally performing closer to where it should but still under what we'd expect.

Quake III Arena High Quality - 1600x1200x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 ATI Radeon 7500 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon 64DDR STMicro Kyro II 123.5 106.5 105.7 92.7 60.3 58.8 56.7 40.3 30.8 | 0 | 25 | 49 | 74 | 99 | 124 | 148

Showing the somewhat dated nature of Quake III as a benchmark, at 1600 x 1200 x 32 the memory bandwidth dependencies are not great enough to push the Radeon 8500 any further up the charts. In fact it falls slightly behind the GeForce3 and still out of reach of the Ti 500.