Product Info

Developer: ATI
MSRP ($US): $199.99
Warranty: 3 Years

System Requirements

• Pentium 4/III/II/Celeron, AMD K6/Athlon or compatible with AGP 2X or AGP 2x/4x universal slot
  
• 64 MB System Memory
  
• Windows 98/98 SE, ME, 2000, NT, and XP
  
• 64 MB of memory (RAM)
  
• DVD Playback requires DVD Drive
  
• Quad speed CD-ROM drive
  

Radeon vs. Geforce. It's probably been the hottest debate for PC gamers the past couple of years. On one side, you have Nvidia, a company who has ruled its competition with an iron fist with its super-fast Geforce technology. Up until recently, ATI was never considered a serious threat to the title of "King of the video cards." But with 3dfx out of the picture, and Matrox redirecting its model toward business users, ATI can no longer run or hide. They have to face the champ head on. The first battle was waged between the Geforce 2 and the original Radeon. It was a long hard battle, but Nvidia would emerge from the smoke as the champ. Now a new battle of video cards has restarted, and it Nvidia's Geforce 3 Ti versus the ATI Radeon 8500. Both cards are feature deep, including full DirectX 8 support. Does the latest Radeon have what it takes to emerge as the champion? First, let's take a look at some of the new features included with the latest revision of Radeon chipset:

As you can see, many of the technologies listed above are just new and improved technologies from the previous Radeon cards. But with the inclusion of DirectX 8.1 and Open GL 1.3 and 1.4 support, the Radeon 8500 will currently support all of the latest features being incorporated into current and future games. However, because the Radeon's Smartshader technology, developers will need to program the game to support the programmable shaders found in both the Geforce 3 and the new Radeon cards. This could be a potential problem if developers do not want to take the time to create an all new set of programmable shaders just for the Radeon.

Another new feature included with the Radeon is Truform. Without getting too technical, Truform reduces the heavy bandwidth that is required to render all of the triangles on screen. That allows developers to add more triangles, which will result in more smoother, realistic models. Here is an example of the power of Truform:

Let's take a look at Rachel:

As you can see, with Truform technology embedded, they were able to increase the number of triangles to her face, without any significant increase in bandwidth. This alleviates a huge bottleneck that has been keeping developers from creating a realistic world at a playable framerate. Games like Serious Sam and Return to Castle Wolfenstein already supports the technology, with future games like Doom 3 will be designed to take full advantage of Truform.

Ever since the now defunct 3dfx made the claims of full screen hardware anti-aliasing, card makers have been scrambling to equip their cards with the best AA performance. With the Radeon 8500, ATI has introduced a more advanced anti-aliasing technology dubbed Smoothvision. What's interesting about Smoothvision is that not only does it perform anti-aliasing better than any other card on the market, it also is the most adjustable. Smooth vision supports 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, and 6x levels of anti-aliasing. But those settings are doubled in ATI, because you can choose those settings between quality and performance. So if you don't mind a little loss in quality in exchange for faster performance, then it is there for you to choose. However, your choices become limited the higher you go. At 1600*1200, you cannot even select anything higher than 2x AA. I tried to find out why the card was so restrictive on the levels of AA, but the folks over at ATI never got back to me. But after doing some further research, I found that it may be due to the card only having 64MB of RAM, whereas 128RAM should support high AA levels at higher resolutions.

Hydrovision is also a new feature included with the Radeon 8500. As with other dual-monitor support software, Hydrovision allows you to run two different applications on two different monitors, but with the same card. But if a game like Serious Sam supports dual-monitor/hydrovision. You can actually play a multilayer game, having more than one person play off of one video card. Using the software, you can perform numerous functions, including launching applications on other monitors by assigning hotkeys. Hydrovision is complemented even further by the fact that the Radeon 8500 comes with s-video and DVI support. This could be really helpful if you are working on some applications which require an extreme attention to detail, or if perhaps you are creating a game, and would like to see how your product looks and perform on different outputs.

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