Radeon 8500 Review

http://www.ati.com/na/pages/products/pc/radeon8500128/index.html

This is a GF4 beater

 

like it Kna, no waffle in that review, and like you said, who cares about how many billions of pixels it can do per second?

 

Nice review, I would yhave got one of those cards myself but too much dough, so I got a cheap Ti200 instead.

No it aint...... the extra 64Mb makes no difference to performance, except at ultra high resolutions with FSAA enabled. No card on the market actually needs 128Mb in any way right now, though in the future now doubt they will need it. Not even the Gf4 makes full use of the 128Mb on the most expensive models (with texture compression, the textures only take up about 50Mb on most games, and a little more than 64 for those games which are *really* demanding).

In the case of the 128Mb Radeon 8500, it is nowt more than the 'normal' R8500 with extra memory, where as the GeForce 4 is considerably better than the GeForce 3 before it (up to 50% faster in some situations, usually at least 20% faster). The Radeon wont keep up with the GeForce 4, 128Mb or not

The next ATi card (the R300) might though, unless Nvidia rolls out yet another all new card before (given their current 6 month product cycle), in which case leaving the R300 playing catch up from the start.......

/me scuttles off back to my video card forum.........

 

GF4 will not necessarily (sorry sp - corrected by RTT ) leave the R200 in the dust. The R200 can do all things a GF3/4 can in 1 pass, unlike 2/3 for the GF3/4, Its only slower cause its unoptimised (drivers... cmon ati!!)

See what John Carmac has to say about it all (previous post) - its not that far off. And as soon as graphics cards start rendering at 64bit graphics and scale it down to 32bit for better image colour quiality (aparently - like the old voodoos who used to render in 32bit and scale down to 16bit )and games use bigger textures (up to 512x512/1024x1024 aparently) youll need the extra mem at standard resolutions. However - games need to be developed todo that, which (as Kna quite rightly pointed out) isnt gonna happen until at least DOOM 3/Serious Sam 2 etc come out.

Can you tell the diff between 150fps and 155fps?!! GF4 is not worth the cash IMO.

 

Thats why i will never understand why people still use quake 3 as a test bed...

its OK saying people benchmark there new super fast XP2000+ clocked to god knows what, with a geforce7 ( ) can hit 500fps in quake 3 time demo.

How can you tell its hiting 500fps, your eyes cant distinguish past 60-70fps (or is it less).

So for all you know the computer MAYBE lying to you, it theory it could be hitting say 200fps, and as it cant really scale pass that it might MAKE the fuigure up.

For gods sake there are MORE demanding games graphichal then quake 3, to list a few ;

Max Payne
AvP2
RTCW (yeah i know its based on the same engine)
Serious Sam

Why can we test using these games.

 

yea but u cant really bench them.

And everyone else has done quake so its what people look for, for comparisons - like 3dmark. Regardless of system specs etc..

as soon as the new doom is realeased youll see a who new benching begin

 

Yeah it's between 60 and 72 Hz (ish) your eyes see. But having a constant 150fps does of course mean that if the action gets hot enough with 40 players fraggin each other at once you're framerate ain't gonna drop to 27fps.... It'll probably hit 100 or so, which is nice.

I agree with not using Quake 3 as a benchmark, I even saw that Apple are using it as a bench for their new dual CPU Macs with the GF4 MX's on board, gimme a break. No one buys a Mac for anythin but Photoshop and other similar programs and music shtuff. No one cares about it's Quake 3 bench, they just care about its PS performance etc.

The Serious Engine owns all, it should be used as a default benchmark but it ain't gonna happen I don't think.

....I'd suggest the Lithtech Engine but I'd get shot, muhahahaha!

 

Surely there must be a better bnchmark that a game thats pushing 3/4 years old now

 

game engines take donkeys yrs to develop, especially as video hardware improves so much. You have to make it compatible across x no. of platforms with x no. of software/hardware versions/configurations.

like said though - cant wait for DOOM 3

also - what about movies that are shown at 24 or 30fps? surely if your eyes could detect flickers at 60hz then 30hz would be like a fly watching tv?

 

Im still waiting for Metal Gear Solid 2, which does look rather 1337!

 

/me has a beta demo of the first two levels of MGS2

 

Nice review, I'm kinda partial to ATI myself. One thing has always bothered me about video cards, it seems like they built em all upside down. All the components on the underside making heat which is trapped under there. Seems to me it would make more sense to have the hot items on top so the heat could get away easier. There must be a reason for them being like that, but i cant see what it is. Maybe if it has to be made like that, they could use perforated PCB, holes where ever there is room for any. OK, just a lil rant of mine, I feel better now. Somebody please explain the flaws in my logic about this.

 

My guess would be that, due to the layout of PCI, the 'depth' of the card is downwards, due to the backplate pointing down. You have 1.5cm ish to play with before you possibly interfere with the card below.

If you were to put the components of the card on top then the depth would be 1.5cm down and whatever the height of the components on top.

That'd work if *everyone* made their cards with components on the top, but which manufacturer is going to take the risk first

 

ATi i bet

 

Quick bit of info...

The 128Mb Radeon XT is supposed to be based on the r250 core, and run at around 350Mhz I seem to recall (It might be 300 but I can't quite remember), so it is not just a beef up of the RAM, and will be faster than the 8500 (r200 core). I think its supposed to be called the 8900.. And its due out April/May last I heard.

The card I'm waiting for is the r300 based card (some people place it as 400/450 Mhz but this is mostly speculation). It is scheduled to be released to manufacturers Q3 for end of year sales (It may slip, who knows)...

The XT is supposed to help compete with the GF4 Ti range (Ignoring the badly named gf4mxs..) and the r300 beat it. nVidia should be releasing a beefed up gf4 (Well acording to form anyhow) in around 6 months... About same time as r300... So its anyones' guess as to who is top for half a year


One last thing, fps means more than just watchable... 24 fps can deceive your eyes and mind into thinking it is moving, but 30 fps is generally too slow to play on due to other things, response time, tearing when system not 100% dedicated to graphics, sound, network, hdd access texture loading.... 80 fps seems to be good from most aspects (my point of view) but I like the 8500s 150+ (Depending on MOD and map) in quake3 (and was cheaper than the gf3 when I bought it retail..).

I suppose I should mention that there is a huge difference between FPS and vertical refresh rate. With a CRT the vertical refresh rate (horizontal is mostly ignored due to being in the Mhz range) the electron gun scans the phosphor giving the image.. Thus a low refresh rate will lead to flicker... You can have a 200Hz refresh and a 1fps game and get no flicker... But a 30Hz refresh and a 200 fps game will be fuzzy and flicker alot... (Most if not all of you will know this, and its highly likely that I just misread a comment.... But is info anyway..)

(Note I have owned / compared to Radeon 64DDR, GF3, GF2 GTS - Faster and better image quality than all...)


Z.

 

Dup. Z.

 

Dup again...

Z.

 

Actually the Quake 3 engine is mainly graphics orientated. I.E. it spends most of it's time generating graphics rather than A.I. etc. As such it is capable of pushing graphics cards harder before the CPU becomes the limiting factor. The downside is of course it doesn't make use of many of the newer features of the latest cards. It's certainly a good test of DAC performance.

 

Sorry, duplicate post.

Z

P.S. Been having some trouble submitting.. It said it failed, when it actually worked.... Annoying...

 

I bought the old raedon 64 DDR VIVo in November, somthing inside me makes me wish I had waited to pick up the 8500 DV, for just a little more, and a little later...