ATI's Radeon 8500 - New drivers expose potential

The Test

Because of the demand for performance measurements on an Athlon platform we ran all gaming tests on an EPoX 8KHA+ with an AMD Athlon XP 1800+. Our OS of choice was Windows XP Professional with the OS configured for benchmarking per Microsoft's recommendations.

We only compared the Radeon 8500 to the NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 since that is its targeted competitor. Due to time constraints (read: Comdex) we were not able to run Black & White tests or 1600 x 1200 tests under Quake III Arena; luckily what we were able to run will give you a good idea of the overall performance of the Radeon 8500 paired with the new 7.13.06 drivers.

Serious Sam Maximum Settings - 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 ATI Radeon 8500 109 91 | 0 | 22 | 44 | 65 | 87 | 109 | 131

With the release drivers the GeForce3 Ti 500 was just over 22% faster than the Radeon 8500 under Serious Sam. Unfortunately the new drivers from ATI just barely bite into that lead cutting it down to 19% in this case.

Serious Sam Maximum Settings - 1600x1200x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 ATI Radeon 8500 57 52 | 0 | 11 | 23 | 34 | 46 | 57 | 68

At 1600 x 1200 the Radeon is able to do a bit better, falling around 10% behind the GeForce3 Ti 500. This is an improvement from the 16% lead NVIDIA held in the original review but it is by no means a performance parity.