ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 17, 2001 3:36 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Black & White
A very different type of game than what you're used to seeing in these reviews, Black & White places you in control of a civilization as their god. This Direct3D game relies on a high enough frame rate that navigating around your worshippers' villages isn't choppy. The user has a third person perspective of the world.
The game was set to 1024 x 768 x 32/1600 x 1200 x 32 with the preset maximum detail configuration used. We used fraps to take the average frame rate during the intro scene with the family and their child journeying towards the water (the movie was skipped). Note that the latest version of fraps does take an actual average frame rate so this is not an estimate.
Black & White will not start with fraps running in the background so you must first start B&W, switch back to the desktop to run fraps, and then switch back to B&W.
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64When we first looked at the Radeon 8500 it was being outperformed by the GeForce2 Pro; with final silicon and drivers it can now claim victory over the GeForce2 Pro but it unfortunately cannot declare the same over any card with GeForce3 in its name.
ATI honestly wasn't aiming at the low end of the GeForce3 line with the Radeon 8500 but that's where the card falls in line today.
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Unfortunately the Radeon 8500 would cause the system to reboot at 1600 x 1200 x 32 and thus is absent from these benchmarks. We would have expected the Radeon to be even more competitive with the GeForce3 Ti 200 and possibly even the GeForce3 here because of its memory bandwidth advantages.
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