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Benchmarks
and Comparisons - R8500 Vrs. GF3 Ti500 |
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Vupline and Quake
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The final scores
are coming to a close here. Let's look at what
Vulpine's GLMark has to offer.
It looks as if
the driver team at ATi still has a fair amount of work to do
with OpenGL performance. This is painfully obvious in
1600X1200 resolution where the hardware becomes more of a
limitation than drivers and software overhead. The
R8500 is actually fairly close in high resolutions with this
test.
The final word
of course, comes from Quake 3 Arena.
Once again,
we'll let the numbers stand on their own merit. The
Radeon 8500 seems to be a flagship class piece of hardware
that is still hampered by sub par driver performance.
Three weeks have
gone by since initial test of the Radeon 8500 and ATi is
keeping its commitment of regular driver updates in 2 - 3
week cycles. This is the first revision of the driver
since launch and for sure many of the issues have been
rectified and overall performance has improved
significantly. We are encouraged by ATi's efforts with
the release and hope that they will continue to optimize,
their more than capable 3D Graphics Hardware platform, with
better and better software.
At this point,
we feel obligated to rate the Radeon 8500 as the card has
been on the retail market for a month now and ATi has taken
strides to improve upon the product. However, frankly
we were hoping for more with this driver release. The
R8500 still couldn't drive AA correctly, if at all in
certain games and still at least one other title we are
aware of, is basically non-functional on this card.
Performance with
the R8500 is a bit of a mixed bag. At various points
in our testing the product showed moments of excellence and
strength versus others in its class. Still at times we
were left expecting more from a top of the line card in the
$250 - $299 price range. We're going to cross our
collective fingers for now and hope that ATi continues to
improve on the drivers for the R8500 and allow it to be all
it can be. We're giving the Radeon 8500 a HotHardware
Heat Meter Rating of...
Do You
have something meaningful to say or do you just want to flap
your gums? Get some in the Hot Hardware PC Harware Forum
now!
.gif)
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