ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

NVIDIA's Fears

While it was their Riva 128 that put NVIDIA on the map, it was their GeForce series of cards that made them a leader in the industry. The GeForce line, from the original 256 up to the current GeForce3 Ti 500, has been the most successful series of graphics cards we have ever seen. It is very clear that the vast majority of gamers use NVIDIA cards because of their performance and very reliable drivers. Looking at the AnandTech Community alone, out of 4911 members that have filled out their System Rigs page, over 3000 of them use NVIDIA cards -- that's over 60%. With all that NVIDIA has going for themselves, why on earth would they worried by a meager Radeon 8500?

It turns out that the Radeon 8500 isn't all that meager. In fact, the part has a greater fill rate and more memory bandwidth than NVIDIA's GeForce3 Ti 500. ATI's SMOOTHVISION AA is also supposedly better when it comes to visual quality and theoretically should incur a lesser or equal performance penalty to that of NVIDIA's Quincunx AA. And although support for Pixel Shader 1.4 isn't really a strong point of the Radeon 8500, John Carmack has already commented on the chip's future performance in Doom 3 saying that it will be able to render the game's many textures in as few as a single pass compared to the multiple passes that the GeForce3 would have to take.

There are some very valid causes for NVIDIA to be worried about the Radeon 8500, but none of their worries has any merit if ATI cannot get over their biggest problem: drivers.