by FastSite
12/03/2001 | 12:00 AM
It is no secret that for a long period of time ATI was in the "catching-up" position in relation to NVIDIA. There were certain reasons for that: take, for instance, the RADEON chip announced about a year ago. This chip being a response to NVIDIA GeForce2, was really late to come. It had about the same performance as GeForce2 did, but was considerably more expensive. ATI turned out very stubborn and didn't want to cut down the prices until the end of year 2000, and that's why RADEON still didn't reach the popularity of GeForce2. After all, the customers voting with their wallets for a more expensive graphics card wanted to see its indisputable advantages. But it was obvious that RADEON unfortunately had not so many advantages comparing to GeForce2, especially to approve of a high price like that. The other factor that led to the drop-down of RADEON popularity was the quality of the drivers. The RADEON drivers caused so many complaints that they were just scaring away the customers against the background of the constantly improving NVIDIA's software developers. Now we see the outcome of that: NVIDIA is the absolute leader in the gaming graphics card market.
But ATI seems to have learned its lesson, and the release of RADEON 8500 appeared a very painful blow to NVIDIA.
First, RADEON 8500 proved to be faster and more perfect than GeForce3. Second, ATI RADEON 8500 graphics cards turned out to be cheaper than GeForce3 Ti500, which can be regarded as none other but a preventive move against NVIDIA's pricing policy. Third, ATI released normally working drivers for RADEON 8500.
So, let us have a look at the solution that let ATI hope for winning the leadership.
Here follow the basic characteristics of ATI RADEON 8500:
General specifications:
3D Graphics:
2D Graphics:
All the specifications make RADEON 8500 look if not more impressive, then at least as strong as NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500, the today's gaming 3D-graphics king.
The first thing that catches our eye is the fact that ATI developers gave up the idea of using three texturing units in the pipeline. Apparently, the sad experience of RADEON 256, which third texturing unit stayed idle most of the time, inspired ATI to make the same decision as GeForce3 developers did. RADEON 8500 is capable of texturing polygons with up to 6 textures at a time, spending one extra clock cycle in case of more than two textures and one more extra clock cycle in case of more than 4 textures. GeForce3 chips from NVIDIA (now already GeForce3 Ti 200/500) lay up to 4 textures in absolutely the same way, having only 2 texture units per each pixel pipeline.
The second interesting feature of RADEON 8500 is the fully fledged support for multi-monitor configurations. It is the first gaming chip that boasts not only high 3D performance but also provides fully fledged support of multi-monitor configurations.
Thus, RADEON 8500 supports new technologies side by side with the old ones, which stood the test of time and have been certainly improved since the times of RADEON 256. That's why it is better to start with the technologies implemented in RADEON 8500 and their peculiarities.
ATI is showing the graphics pipeline of RADEON 8500 on the following flowchart:
Looking at this flowchart, we arrive to an interesting conclusion: the triangles tessellation (splitting) is performed before processing in the T&L unit and vertex shaders are applied to the already "chopped" triangles. This implies that the TRUFORM technology support is not painless and could lead to a significant performance loss in case of heavy tessellation, because the great number of triangles obtained as a result of TRUFORM technology could lead to a significant load increase for T&L unit and vertex shaders.
A few words about the TRUFORM. This technology is implemented in RADEON 8500 on the hardware level. It allows improving the models quality in games by tessellating triangles that make up those models. This tessellation uses information about the directions of normals at the triangle vertices. RADEON 8500 uses this information to build an N-Patch, i.e., a surface which curvature is defined with control points, and to split it into smaller triangles. Their quantity is determined by the level of tessellation:
The tessellation principles used by TRUFORM technology are described in great detail in the official white paper on the ATI website, so we will not repeat anything, but will just illustrate the TRUFORM algorithms discussed in that document:
As a result of TRUFORM technology application, the model appears smoother and more natural, and the most important thing is that the accelerator doesn't need any extra data. The normals, which are mostly passed over to the accelerator, already carry enough info for it to calculate the lighting, for example.
Therefore, the TRUFORM technology is expected to improve models quality in existing games without involving extra programming efforts (there are patches for some games enabling TRUFORM).
But in practice far not everything goes that easy. If all the models got smoothed, then those objects that need some edgy elements in their shape, for example, some weapons, would become a sorry sight: imagine a gun or a rifle with muzzle shaped like a cucumber… So, the software guys should still be involved in the process in order to avoid disappointments: for some polygons tessellation should be disabled, for other polygons -enabled, some objects may need an extra polygon added, the other may need one removed, and so on. At the moment, using TRUFORM in existing games brings about a less impressive result than one could imagine.
Our resume is that TRUFORM is certainly a smart technology, but its capabilities and peculiarities have to be undoubtedly taken into consideration when the games are developed, otherwise it will not show its best and will not prove a real advantage of the graphics cards supporting it.
And now that the due application for TRUFORM has not been found yet, we can only wait for some new games and hope to see a proper implementation of this cool technology one day.
The name SMARTSHADER covers both: pixel and vertex shaders of RADEON 8500, which were called PIXEL TAPESTRY II and CHARISMA ENGINE II.
The vertex shaders unit of RADEON 8500, as well as that of GeForce3, is capable of processing shaders up to 128 commands long and has 96 constant and 12 temporary registers:
The pixel shaders unit of RADEON 8500 is more advanced compared with that of GeForce3: it can process shaders up to 22 instructions long, which are transformed into the settings of the pixel shader unit: 6 texture sampling operations, 8 addressing commands and 8 shading commands:
Just for a better comparison: the pixel shaders unit of GeForce3 is capable of working with a maximum of 4 textures, and the pixel shader length may be up to 12 commands - 4 sampling operations and 8 shading operations.
In addition to all this stuff, the pixel shaders unit of RADEON 8500 supports unified addressing and shading commands, which correspond to the DirectX 8.1 pixel shader specification v1.4.
The clear and simple conclusion is that RADEON 8500 does not only support pixel and vertex shaders of DirectX8.0 and DirectX8.1, but can also show more progressive "special effects" because of its richer possibilities than those of GeForce3, or cope with difficult effects faster than GeForce3.
At present the pixel shaders v1.4 are used only in ATI demos, and again we've got to be patient and to wait for the implementation of these features in future games.
SMOOTHVISION is a new full-scene anti-aliasing method, acting like DirectX 8.0 Multi-Sample Buffer, which in its turn comes from the idea suggested by the late 3dfx in its T-Buffer technology some time ago.
The full-scene anti-aliasing of RADEON 8500 is implemented the same way as in Voodoo5. It is based on small shifts of scene geometry (Vertex Jittering) and further combining of colors of the obtained "shifted" samples. However, this idea is implemented in RADEON 8500 more successfully. First, ATI claims that RADEON 8500 may use up to 8 samples to produce the pixel color (Voodoo5 can use up to 4 samples). And second, RADEON 8500 may choose an optimal number of samples for further processing depending on the pixel location (a pixel may be situated at the edge of a polygon or inside it). This way it appears possible to prevent certain areas from being smoothed.
Let us make a preliminary conclusion: the implementation of full-scene anti-aliasing in RADEON 8500 is totally different from that in GeForce3, and should definitely surpass in quality the FSAA in NVIDIA GeForce3.
The current ATI drivers allow forcing SMOOTHVISION in OpenGL as well as in Direct3D, but the maximum number of samples is currently limited by 6 probably due to some performance issues.
We naturally couldn't help paying attention to the differences in image quality and performance losses caused by turning on the SMOOTHVISION technology. The results and conclusions will follow.
HyperZ II is an improved version of HyperZ technology, which advantages and algorithms we have already discussed in great detail in our ATI RADEON LE Review.
HyperZ and HyperZ II serve to increase the performance of the graphics accelerator by implementing the Hidden Surface Removal (HSR). That means that it should save the core time and trouble drawing those parts of the scene objects that are hidden behind closer located objects, as drawing them makes absolutely no sense and is just a waste of time and effort.
For example, imagine a scene in a game, which consists of two rooms separated by a closed door, and your character is standing in one of the rooms facing the door. Then, if you have a badly optimized game engine, it would accurately send all the polygons of the scene to the accelerator to be drawn, though the second room is completely hidden by the closed door, and drawing its interior would be a waste of time for the accelerator. The task of HSR is whenever possible to prevent the accelerator from useless activity like that. And the higher is the Overdraw, the greater performance gain can be granted by the HSR.
ATI developers have been improving HyperZ of RADEON 256 for over a year since it emerged. They reduced 4 times the tile of Z-buffer and introduced a number of other changes, the most important of which is the enhancement of Z-buffer compression algorithm. All those changes are promised to lead to an average 20-percent increase in accelerator performance.
Well, enough for the theory, let's carry on with some practice. :-)
The retail version of RADEON 8500 is shipped in a huge, aggressively designed box:
The package includes a CD disk with the drivers, a user's manual and a set of cables for all possible purposes:
The graphics card is equipped with an analog Out for a monitor and also both DVI- and TV-Outs. The card's PCB doesn't strike as vividly colored: it is made of traditional green textolite:
The heart of this graphics card is the RADEON 8500 chip working at 275MHz clock frequency.
There are 64MB of memory installed (128bit DDR SDRAM), the chips are made by Hynix (former Hyundai) and feature 3.6ns access time.
The graphics memory clock frequency is 550MHz (275MHz DDR). It's remarkable that the graphics memory of RADEON 8500 works well at higher frequencies compared to the memory of GeForce3 Ti 500. Moreover, the memory chips require no heatsinks for heat dissipation (and noise shielding). And even the cooler on a chip doesn't boast any impressive look as by GeForce3 or GeForce3 Ti500 based solutions. This shows that the RADEON 8500 card layout is of better quality and the core heat dissipation is smaller than by GeForce3 Ti500.
The TV-Out is implemented via ATI Rage Theater chip:
The card also incorporates an external ADV7123 RAMDAC from Analog devices, which sends the analog signals to the DVI-connector along with digital signal coming from an integrated TMDS-transceiver. The DVI-to-VGA adapter in the package allows to connect two analog monitors to the board. But the image quality for the second monitor won't be that high because the external RAMDAC supports only 240MHz.
The CD disk, which comes with the board, contains drivers for Windows 9x, 2000, NT and XP alongside with DVD and VideoCD software players, and DirectX 8.0. The drivers provided on the CD disk do not support SMOOTHVISION that's why for our tests we used the newer driver version with SMOOTHVISION support.
The graphics card properties in "Display Settings" look mostly like in case of older drivers:
However, as you may notice, OpenGL and Direct3D properties pages now provide links to SMOOTHVISION. If you click these links, you will get into SMOOTHVISION properties page:
Since RADEON 8500 fully supports multi-monitor configurations, it has a special properties page for multi-monitor configurations. You can find more details on RADEON 8500 working in multi-monitor configurations, with DVI and TV-Out in our ATI RADEON VE Review, as RAVEON VE and RADEON 8500 boast similar features here.
Our testbed was configured in the following way:
For a better comparison we ran extra tests with Intel Pentium 4 1400MHz CPU, a mainboard based on Intel 850 chipset and 256MB RDRAM.
We decided to compare the performance of our today's hero with that shown by Leadtek WinFast based on NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 and Leadtek WinFast based on GeForce3 Ti200 working at standard frequencies. Later on we'll refer to them just as GeForce3 Ti500 and GeForce3 Ti200.
Taking into consideration that currently RADEON 8500 LE cards have appeared in the market (they differ from ATI RADEON 8500 by lower price and lower frequencies, working at 250MHz/250MHz vs. 275MHz/275MHz of the regular RADEON 8500), we decided underclock our RADEON 8500 and to test it at the working frequencies of RADEON 8500 LE, i.e. at 250MHz/250MHz.
We used the following software:
Let's start with the most interesting issue: the performance of pixel and vertex shaders by RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500/200:
In spite of its higher clock frequencies, the pixel shaders unit of RADEON 8500, PIXEL TAPESTRY II, proves to be slower than that of GeForce3 Ti500 in 800x600x16 resolution, though HyperZ II and massive texture caching allow it to break ahead in 1600x1200x32.
The vertex shaders unit, CHARISMA ENGINE II, has demonstrated overwhelming power: its performance was more than twice as high as that of GeForce3 Ti500. As for software acceleration, RADEON 8500 fell a bit behind, because of the absence of FastWrites support as well as of insufficient optimization of geometrical data transfer via AGP.
High Polygon Count benchmark proves once again the complete failure of GeForce3 T&L unit.
It is noteworthy that the twice or even three times as high performance of RADEON 8500 in geometry processing tasks will allow enabling TRUFORM in future games very easily even without introducing any high level of tessellation. In other words, you will have no concerns about the gaming performance and will simply enjoy super high-quality images in the game.
Now come the fillrate tests:
We'd like to remind you that this test is very extraordinarily arranged: the thing we see on the screen is actually 64 semi-transparent textures laid over the polygons as big as the screen. In case of multi-texturing, the polygons are covered with the maximum number of textures the accelerator can handle. Note that in this case the number of polygon "layers" will equal to 64/4=16 in case the accelerator can lay, for example, 4 textures in a single pass. If there's no multi-texturing enabled, 64 polygon layers with a single texture per layer are created.
Returning to our results, we discovered a very interesting phenomenon: although in 16bit mode RADEON 8500 managed to leave GeForce3 Ti500 far behind, it suffered a total defeat in 32bit mode without multi-texturing. Why? We had to run additional tests changing the texture color depth, frame buffer and Z-buffer from 16bit to 32bit. Here is what we've got:
Now the situation has become somewhat clearer: it turns out 32bit frame buffer imposes a great strain over the accelerator thus slowing it down significantly. Probably, RADEON 8500 with its perfect texture-caching system and Z-buffer optimization, draws back only when the amount of information to be read from and written into the frame buffer, which can hardly be cached (though there's an example of such caching: tile architecture of KYRO and KYRO II). The test with disabled multi-texturing, which uses transparency effect for each pixel coloring forces the accelerator to read the color value stored in the frame buffer first, and then, after the texture is laid, to write the new value back into the buffer. GeForce3 Ti500/200, which is equipped with a more efficient "split" memory controller, feel much more at home in this case than RADEON 8500.
With multi-texturing enabled RADEON 8500 draws 6 textures in each layer at a time, which makes the total number of requests to the buffer 6 times smaller, correspondingly. So, it safely overtakes GeForce3 Ti500/200, which can lay the maximum of 4 textures in a pass.
There is a good test to measure the effectiveness of HSR algorithms, i.e. HyperZ II by RADEON 8500 and Z Occlusion Culling by GeForce3 Ti500/200. This test is called VillageMark and measures the performance of the graphics accelerators when a scene with high Overdraw is displayed:
At low resolutions HyperZ II shows almost twice as high efficiency compared with HSR implementation by GeForce3, but at higher resolutions the advantage of RADEON 8500 gets down to null little by little.
So, in synthetic tests RADEON 8500 appeared a real success, having outperformed its main competitor, GeForce3 Ti500, almost everywhere. Let us see now what is going on in gaming tests.
Having started with synthetic 3DMark 2001 benchmarks in the previous section, we continue our review with the gaming tests:
The developers have added a bit of randomness to this test, so the results always present a sheer brain-cracker. CPU is loaded very heavily here, which you can see on the diagrams: the results hardly depend on the screen resolution. Therefore, if RADEON 8500 failed in this benchmark, we wouldn't take it very much to heart. But the new offspring of ATI even beats GeForce3 Ti500 a little in low-detail mode and runs neck and neck with it in the high-detail mode.
This gaming test doesn't only boast much more textures involved than the previous test, but also loads the T&L unit and vertex shaders considerably greater. The number of polygons in the scene has become significantly higher, and the entire model animation was set via vertex shaders. That is why RADEON 8500, which showed excellent performance in synthetic tests of T&L and vertex shaders performance, turned out a real leader here. An extra factor that told on this tremendous boost of RADEON 8500 performance was high Overdraw rate in this benchmark, which offered HyperZ II of RADEON 8500 a great opportunity to show its advantages.
An unpleasant fact is that although RADEON 8500 appeared a leader in this test, its performance dropped much greater when switching from 16bit to 32bit than by GeForce 3 Ti500/200.
Here, in the simplest benchmark, RADEON 8500 shows about the same results as GeForce3 Ti500. And again we notice a vast performance plunge when switching over from 16bit to 32bit mode.
Coming closer to GeForce3 Ti500 in 16bit modes, RADEON 8500 falls back seriously in 32bit mode. At first glance, this signals that pixel shaders are processed too slowly or the driver is ill-optimized, but having watched the test carefully we discovered that the minimum FPS rates were achieved for scenes with grass and trees, and the maximum FPS rates - for scenes with the lake surface covering most of the screen. If we take into account that grass and leaves on the trees consist of polygons with transparent textures, we will right away recall the unpleasant results of the synthetic fillrate benchmark.
But drawing the lake surface, which is created with pixel shaders, arouses no difficulties for RADEON 8500.
One way or another, this test unfortunately leaves GeForce3 Ti500 unattainably far ahead.
The Quake3 Arena testing was performed with maximum quality settings. Tri-linear filtering and texture compression were enabled.
The sensational "optimization" of the 4.13.7206 driver, which worsened the image quality in Quake3 Arena really significantly, is now gone. Now the pictures obtained by RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500/200 are of about the same quality (however, this review devotes a whole section to the image quality discussion, so the exact meaning of this "about" still has to be figured out). RADEON 8500, however, doesn't manage to beat GeForce3 Ti500: it falls some 2%-5% behind and this gap grows bigger as the resolution goes up.
Again, we witness a noticeable performance drop by RADEON 8500 when we switch over from 16bit to 32bit mode.
In this game RADEON 8500 appears in an even worse situation: its lag behind GeForce3 Ti500 grows up to 10%. Looking back at the perfect results of RADEON 8500 in Direct3D, we could make the conclusion that there's a good field of work for ATI software developers: OpenGL driver optimization.
So, the results of gaming tests let us claim that the average performance of RADEON 8500 is almost the same as that of GeForce3 Ti500, and better performance in Direct3D is "compensated" with a little lag in OpenGL.
To begin with, we would like to say that we will compare the quality of tri-linear and anisotropic filtering by RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500. For our investigation we took a scene from Quake 3 Arena:
Tri-linear filtering:
ATI RADEON 8500 | NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 | |
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With MIP-Levels | ||
ATI RADEON 8500 | NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 | |
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As it can be seen from these screenshots, RADEON 8500 uses approximation for some reason instead of tri-linear filtering. The same situation occurs in Serious Sam and American McGee's Alice. This makes the picture quality suffer, sometimes it suffers really badly. Of course, this is a shortcoming: why should they use approximation if the performance drop even with the enabled tri-linear filtering would be very small? Probably, only ATI engineers would be able to answer this question.
Anisotropic filtering:
ATI RADEON 8500 | NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 | |
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The quality of anisotropic filtering by RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 turned out to be almost equal. However, RADEON 8500 has some artifacts near MIP-levels borders because it doesn't allow enabling tri-linear and anisotropic filtering together.
However, here RADEON 8500 shows something to be proud of and we can't help showing it to you:
The performance drops so little when anisotropic filtering by RADEON 8500 is enabled that you can surely set the maximum level of anisotropic filtering right away without any hesitation and forget about it. The same trick couldn't be applied to GeForce3 Ti500 though: the performance drop may reach 50% in case of max. anisotropic filtering settings.
And now the most interesting thing comes. Let's take a glance at SMOOTHVISION, a new full-scene anti-aliasing technology in comparison with the full-scene anti-aliasing with multisampling from NVIDIA. The driver allows enabling SMOOTHVISION in Direct3D as well as in OpenGL, and the image quality by RADEON 8500 is the same in both cases.
So, let's compare the screenshots taken from Homeworld Cataclysm for RADEON 8500 with SMOOTHVISION ("Quality" mode) with the screenshots taken for GeForce3 Ti500:
| No FSAA | ||
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FSAA 2x on NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 | ||
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FSAA 4x on NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 | ||
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Quincunx on NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 | ||
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SMOOTHVISION 2x Quality on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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SMOOTHVISION 3x Quality on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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SMOOTHVISION 4x Quality on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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SMOOTHVISION 5x Quality on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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SMOOTHVISION 6x Quality on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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In the Performance mode we can see a slight change in the quality of polygon edges smoothing, which is mostly noticeable with SMOOTHVISION 2x and almost invisible with SMOOTHVISION 6x. And the second observation is that the text appears blurred like by NVIDIA GeForce2 or Vodoo5 5500.
SMOOTHVISION 2x Performance on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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SMOOTHVISION 6x Performance on ATI RADEON 8500 | ||
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Thus, we can easily state that the quality of SMOOTHVISION from ATI is much better than the quality of full-scene anti-aliasing from NVIDIA. Note that even 3x anti-aliasing performed by RADEON 8500 is no worse than 4x method performed by NVIDIA, not to mention those modes of SMOOTHVISION that involve more samples.
One more pleasant feature of SMOOTHVISION is that now there are almost no "dead angles", i.e. anti-aliasing is good at nearly any angle of slope.
Unfortunately, in spite of all its advantages, SMOOTHVISION is not yet completely debugged. For example, in Homeworld Cataclysm running in Direct3D the menu is awfully blurred, moreover depending on the selected SMOOTHVISION quality mode the blurring also differs:
Judging by the fact that the same effect is absent in case of OpenGL, we dare suppose that this is a purely software bug, which is most likely to be corrected in one of the upcoming driver updates
Now let's compare the performance drop caused by enabling SMOOTHVISION in Quake3 Arena with the drop by GeForce3 Ti500:
Unfortunately, this cool image quality shown by RADEON 8500 is far from being free of charge. However, SMOOTHVISION 4x provides much more profound anti-aliasing at almost the same expense. Hopefully, new drivers versions will reduce these performance losses.
As usual, new ATI product boasts high image quality: even in 1600x1200 mode we noticed absolutely no blurring.
At the same time, not everything is alright with the VIVO functions of RADEON 8500. Let us try to explain it. Although Rage Theater chip supports Video-In and Out, RADEON 8500 is equipped only with a Video-Out. Moreover, some components responsible for Video-In implementation are simply absent on the PCB. We hope that in the nearest future VIVO modifications of RADEON 8500 using all the potential of the onboard Rage Theater chip will arrive.
As for the TV-Out quality, it turned out to be traditional high, as we had expected. But this is no news for you: it was quite predictable. :-)
When we tested DVD and VideoCD playback, i.e. tasks using overlays, RADEON 8500 performed nearly impeccable.
There is one fact worth mentioning separately: RADEON supports hardware MPEG2 decoding for DVD playback - Inverted Discrete Cosine Transform, or iDCT. But as we found out, not all the programs for DVD playback are able to use iDCT with RADEON 8500. For instance, the highly popular CyberLink PoweDVD 3.0 player that is shipped with Leadtek cards on NVIDIA Ti500/200 chips does not reveal any significant difference in CPU utilization while playing DVD on RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500. And the authentic ATI DVD Player that is shipped on the same CD with RADEON 8500 drivers seems to make full use of the hardware iDCT support. See for yourself: the diagram that follows below shows an average CPU utilization percentage during playing the movie called "What Dreams May Come" (PAL, 625/50 (720x576), 25 FPS, 6.14Mbps) in full-screen mode at 1600x1200x32 resolution:
The difference could be seen with the naked eye. The only question that arises is why we need hardware support for iDCT, if only 20% of the modern CPUs get utilized even without this support, and buying RADEON 8500 for a system with a weak CPU doesn't make any sense?
Concerning the quality of DVD playback, we should admit that it's pretty hard for use to evaluate it. We could only say that even after a considerably long and thorough study of the screenshot close-ups, we didn't discover any differences between the shots made on RADEON 8500 and those made on GeForce3 Ti500. We could only point out that the general brightness and color saturation differed a little, but this can always be tuned up to your taste.
Now we'll present you some screenshots from the movies:
When we overclocked ATI RADEON 8500 graphics card, it worked well at 305MHz core and 295MHz (590MHz DDR) memory frequencies without any extra cooling. This is a comparatively low result, taking into account that the nominal clock frequencies for RADEON 8500 are 275MHz/275MHz (550MHz). Higher overclocking would require extra cooling solutions, and we'll probably discuss this aspect in our upcoming article.
So, the worthy competitor for NVIDIA has eventually appeared. ATI RADEON 8500 graphics cards don't yield in performance to the cards based on NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500. At that, RADEON 8500 as well as GeForce3 not only conforms with DirectX 8.1 specification, but also sports new 3D technologies improving image quality noticeably. These technologies are, for example, TRUFORM and SMOOTHVISION, and their support is not provided by GeForce3 Ti500/200.
RADEON 8500 boasts excellent 2D image quality and TV-Out implementation, which has always been a strength of all ATI products.
The quality of drivers always matters a lot: surprising as it may sound, ATI software-developers at last released high-quality drivers almost together with the first retail graphics cards. Although there are still some things to work on in the drivers, the situation is incomparably better than at the times when RADEON 256 was launched.
And the last thing we have to highlight here is the price, of course. Now the prices for the ATI RADEON 8500 boards are comparable to the prices of the GeForce3 Ti200-like graphics solutions. We mean, now ATI RADEON 8500 cards boast the best price-to-performance ratio. Note that their performance is very close to that of GeForce3 Ti500, which has been the fastest graphics solution lately.
Nevertheless, we should note that the production cost of ATI RADEON 8500 boards is hardly lower than the one of boards based on NVIDIA chips, therefore NVIDIA and the manufacturers making solutions on its chips have a vast field for price cutting. If this happens, ATI RADEON 8500 will no longer be in a favorable situation. But we, the customers, will anyway love to see the cut-throat competition causing a price drop, of course.
So, if you are an ATI worshipper, go for ATI RADEON 8500 and the card won't disappoint you, believe us.
If you prefer NVIDIA products, then just wait for GeForce3 Ti500/200 graphics cards to get cheaper, because the arrival of ATI RADEON 8500 made the position of GeForce3 Ti500/200 cards very unstable with their current pricing.
And if you haven't yet made up your mind, we hope that our review will help you with that, and the summary of ATI RADEON 8500's advantages and disadvantages will allow you to consider all the pros and cons.
Highs:
Lows: