Radeon 8500 vs. Ti500 — Overclocked Graphics — THG.RU

RADEON 8500 Performance Check

ATI managed to do a good job of getting the excitement level up for its Radeon this past summer. The company released one white-paper after another teasing the graphics-loving community with evermore tantalizing morsels of information. All in all, it looked like there was good reason to hope that Nvidia would get some serious competition for the performance crown it held on to so tightly for so long.

Then, suddenly, it arrived — the Radeon 8500. Too suddenly for my taste. The review samples were made available to testers on a Monday, with a suggested publication date of Tuesday. Less than 24 hours time to get at least a half-way decent first review out the door. Almost impossible. Almost. But who needs sleep? 😉

Well, time for another benchmark view, and this time we are going to concentrate solely on an Athlon platform comparison. The latest and greatest platform setups are cool, but a lot of readers like to see how these monsters of graphics perform on the systems out in the field: You can check out ATi’s Radeon 8500 Is Final Or Something Like That … for our original review of the Radeon 8500, including the benchmarks on a P4 system.

Graphics Cards Compared

Student Driver

Unfortunately, on the driver front the Radeon 8500 has left a lot to be desired. Instead of SmoothVision anti-aliasing, the drivers only support the older (and slower) SuperSampling method. The stability of the Windows XP driver left much to be desired, as did its performance. The «Nature Test» in 3DMark2001 would regularly reboot the computer it was run on. Interestingly, this problem did not occur on a Pentium 4 under Windows XP. 3DMark2000, on the other hand, required up to 5 tries to complete even one successful run under Windows XP (with both CPUґs), as it kept exiting to the Windows desktop. This happened both on the Pentium 4 and the Athlon.

Our Athlon Test Rig

Testing was conducted on an MSI K7 Master-S, a board featuring the AMD761 Chipset. The board was powered by an Athlon 1333 C. Windows 98SE and Windows XP Professional were the operating systems of choice.

All tests were run in 32Bit color. The results for the lesser Radeon 7500 are taken from a previous article for that card, hence the older driver version.

Evolva — DirectX 7 Game — T&L

Evolva was one of the first DirectX 7 games that used hardware T&L.

In Evolva, the Radeon 8500 leads by a very comfortable margin, thanks to its higher memory bandwidth. Like its competitors from Nvidia, the ATi card takes a big performance hit in Windows XP. At lower resolutions, the Ti500 is able to outpace the new Radeon.

Evolva Bump — DirectX 7 Game — T&L, Continued

Here we’ve used the Evolva benchmarks again, but this time with Dot 3 bump mapping enabled.

With bump mapping turned on, the R8500 can no longer overtake the Ti500, and the two are virtually neck-and-neck. This changes in Windows XP, where we see the R8500 fall behind even the old GeForce3!

Giants — DirectX 7 Game — T&L

Giants is a modern game that makes complete use of DirectX 7 features. It offers effects like reflections or Dot3 bump mapping, as well as large outdoor areas.

The R8500’s performance takes a nosedive in Giants. It makes a comeback at very high resolutions, but even then it is only able to beat a GeForce2 Ultra. The picture gets worse in Windows XP. In 1280×1024-32 the card only reaches about half of its Windows 98 performance, and in 1600×1200, the frame counter even dropped below the magical 25fps. To be fair, it should be mentioned that the Nvidia cards are also much slower in Windows XP than in 98.

Unreal Tournament — DirectX 7 Game

Although Unreal Tournament is a comparatively old game, Epic regularly updates the game engine, keeping it current. Besides, the 3D engine can also be found in other games, such as Deus Ex and Rune.

The Windows XP R8500 results should not be given too much weight. Even though V-Sync was disabled, the WinXP drivers refused to accept this setting in the game. The test only ran without V-Sync in 1280×1024. As before, this problem did not occur in Windows 98. Once again, the performance lay below that of comparable Nvidia boards, albeit only marginally. This is typical for UT, which is limited more by the CPU/System than by the graphics card.

Another thing that struck me as odd was that the R8500 was actually slower than its older sibling and was only able to pass it starting at 1600×1200.

Quake 3 — Open GL Game — T&L

Quake 3 is the standard in OpenGL. The 3D Engine can also be found in other games, such as Voyager, FAKK2, Alice, SOF2, RTCW and many more.

In the prestigious Quake 3 test, the R8500 edges out the previous champion, the Ti500! But ATI is using a driver optimization for Quake 3 which results in lower image quality.

RTCW MP Test — Open GL Game — T&L

Although the game’s story has stirred controversy, this game is interesting for testing purposes as it uses a very modern version of the Quake 3 Team Arena 3D engine, which was optimized for large outdoor scenarios.

Surprisingly, the R8500 falls behind in RTCW. The Nvidia driver seems better able to handle the large outdoor areas better than the ATi driver. The ATi driver «optimization» for Quake III does not work in this game.

Villagemark — DirectX 7 Benchmark — T&L

Power VR published this benchmark to prove the superiority of the Kyro’s «tiling» technology. You can download this benchmark here.

The R7500 already gave us a taste of this. In Villagemark, the Radeons are in a class of their own. The driver’s Z-optimization seems to be working flawlessly here. The Nvidia driver, on the other hand, seems to be having some problems coping with the overdraw test.

3D Mark 2001 — DirectX 8 Benchmark

The newest 3DMark version supports DirectX 8 features like Pixel and Vertex shaders, making it an interesting synthetic benchmark for the latest generation of cards.

In the modern 3DMark2001, the Radeon 8500 puts the Ti500 in its place, establishing itself as the new 3DMark leader. While this is quite an achievement, it seems safe to say that this result is due in large part to heavily optimized drivers. This theory is backed up by the Windows XP results, where these cards share almost identical results.

FSAA

The new SmoothVision anti-aliasing is not enabled in the current set of drivers. Instead, they employ the slower SuperSampling method. For this reason, the results we obtained here should be considered preliminary only.

The Direct3D results are an unexpected surprise! Despite the R8500’s SuperSampling handicap (or, letґs say, its yet-to-be-implemented-SmoothVision), the Ti500 is slightly slower in Direct3D! Although previous tests have shown Nvidia’s Direct 3D FSAA implementation to be a performance killer, in this case it is the Radeon that cannot keep up with the Ti500 in OpenGL. 4xFSAA becomes impossible on the R8500 starting at 1024×768-32.

Overclocking

Overclocking with early test samples is usually a bit problematic, as later boards of the same family tend to be a lot more overclocking-friendly due to refined production processes. Nonetheless, I was able to get the Radeon up to 300MHz (core) and 620MHz (memory). (Default: 275/550MHz)

Conclusion

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, ATi’s R8500 has potential. Drawing any definite conclusions is hard at this point, since the drive issue is still looming large, and ATi needs to create some level of comfort for reviewers in this area. Instead of SmoothVision, the driver employs the slower SuperSampling FSAA method and consequently falls noticeably behind the GeForce3 — at least in OpenGL. The Windows XP driver was also far from convincing, causing numerous crashes and offering much lower performance than its Windows 98 counterpart.

This fickle behavior stands in stark contrast to very compelling performance in some cases — Evolva, for example. In the Polygon and Vertex Shader tests of 3DMark2001, the Radeon 8500 is able to clearly outperform Nvidia’s youngest offering, the Ti500. In the Nature test it lags behind, though. Finally, the Radeon’s performance in Giants is utterly disappointing.

So the race remains exciting — but undecided. While some will rejoice in the knowledge that Nvidia is finally getting some real competition, others will be disappointed by the «incomplete» nature of the ATi drivers. Either way, I’m sure we’ll see some interesting debate for some time to come.

ATi is already the uncontested winner in one area, though, and that is feature set. There isn’t a single Nvidia card that offers dual display capability of such quality in this performance category.

In the end, what may tip the scales in the Radeon’s favor is its aggressive pricing. ATi has announced that the estimated retail price will be $299, making the R8500 a good $50 cheaper than the Ti500, which retails at $349. It remains to be seen whether the street prices will stay at this level or drop even further. Considering the Radeon’s good performance, it seems unlikely that the Nvidia card makers will be able to keep the prices of the Ti200 ($199) and the Ti500 ($349) at their current levels.