ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Serious Sam Maximum Settings - 1024x768x32 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 91.2 86.9 74.7 73.8 61.4 57.1 56.4 47.8 41.2 | 0 | 18 | 36 | 55 | 73 | 91 | 109

Rewinding back to August the GeForce3 held a 25% advantage over the Radeon 8500, today that advantage is significantly reduced but not eliminated. Again we see that the Radeon 8500 is very competitive with the GeForce3 Ti 200 but not much beyond that.

Serious Sam Maximum Settings - 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 55.8 48.7 47.9 42.8 37.1 27.7 27 24.8 17.3 | 0 | 11 | 22 | 33 | 45 | 56 | 67

At 1600 x 1200 memory bandwidth is king giving the Radeon 8500 more in common with the older GeForce3 than the Ti 200. The performance of the card still isn't up to par with what we'd expect unfortunately.

Serious Sam Multitextured Fill Rate 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 609.08 541.95 498.55 455.02 381.02 291.18 284.81 256.35 176.28 | 0 | 122 | 244 | 365 | 487 | 609 | 73

Another beauty of the Serious Sam engine is the ability to measure fill rate from within the game. Compare these figures to the 3DMark 2001 figures and you'll see why we placed those in the "theoretical" benchmarks section. The Radeon 8500 falls in between the GeForce3 and the GeForce3 Ti 200 both of which have a lesser theoretical fill rate. These figures are resolution independent meaning that they could very well be driver limited; ATI has expressed their displeasure with the current status of OpenGL drivers of the Radeon 8500 which could explain some of the poor performance here.