ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Theoretical Performance

In all of our CPU and chipset reviews we start out with a few theoretical benchmarks; more specifically, how does the product we're looking at perform when the pesky real world variables are silenced. Things such as software incompatibilities, drivers, etc... take a back seat to the raw performance of the product; in this case, the Radeon 8500.

For the theoretical performance of the Radeon 8500 we chose two benchmarks: 3DMark 2001 and VillageMark. We'll start with 3DMark 2001.

The first column of numbers is the multitextured fill rate of the cards compared here and in this case, the Radeon 8500 does incredibly well. With a 35% fill rate advantage over the GeForce3 and a 14% advantage over the GeForce3 Ti 500 the potential for the Radeon 8500 to succeed is definitely there. You should also note that the fill rate of the Radeon 7500 is virtually identical to that of the GeForce3 Ti 200, but we already know from previous investigations that the 7500 is no match for the GeForce3 Ti 200.

The Radeon 8500 again flexes its muscle in the high polygon count triangle rate test, offering close to 3x the triangle throughput of the GeForce3 Ti 500.

The highest performance with Environment Mapped Bump Mapping enabled lies with the GeForce3 Ti 500 and interestingly enough, the Radeon 8500 is no faster than the Radeon 7500 in this test. This could be the first sign of the flagship's current limitations. It is also worth noting that performance with DOT3 bump mapping enabled is improved tremendously with the 7.60.04 drivers.

If we are to believe that 3DMark 2001 is the first and only true DX8 test available today, then we can conclude that the Radeon 8500's Vertex Shader is considerably stronger than the GeForce3 Ti 500's unit. It seems like it would take a NV core with dual vertex shaders to offer the same performance as the Radeon 8500; is it a coincidence that the NV2A core used in the Xbox (and supposedly NV25 derived) has dual vertex shaders? The same huge advantage isn't extended to pixel shader performance but the Radeon 8500 does hang on to the lead.

While we have not seen extensive use of Point Sprites in current games, the potential is there. ATI's waterfall demo takes advantage of the Radeon 8500's powerful point sprite capabilities.