ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Remember, this is a preview

The Radeon 8500 won't be out until the second or third week of September.  Although the drivers and board we received were very mature, they still had some issues.  The first issue we noted was that the performance of the product was not up to our expectations.  ATI has assured us that this will improve as newer drivers become available, but for now just keep in mind that this is a preview of the product technology. 

The Test

We picked an Athlon MP platform (single processor) simply because we wanted to see the effects of the Palomino core on 3D benchmarking.  By the time the Radeon 8500 hits the streets, the desktop Palomino will be available making the Athlon MP the ideal choice for this review.  

We chose Windows 2000 as the preferred OS because of the quick transition away from 9x/Me platforms by Microsoft.  Windows XP has a lot in common with Windows 2000 and they even share a lot of the same driver base, especially when it comes to video cards.  Because of this we have also included a Windows 98 vs. Windows 2000 vs. Windows XP driver comparison to make sure we are not unfairly favoring one card over another because of poor drivers in a particular OS.

All of our tests were conducted at 1024 x 768 x 32 with v-sync disabled.  The reason for standardizing on one resolution is because we wanted to stick with the most commonly used resolution.  With all of the detail settings to the maximum, 1024 x 768 x 32 is the best balance between image quality and performance for the majority of these cards.  We have included resolution scaling and FSAA tests for the GeForce3 and the Radeon 8500 in order to not unfairly penalize one card.