This chip is presented by Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H3 RADEON 8500 Deluxe 128MB, AGP card.
Features:
- ATI RADEON 8500 chip, 300 MHz clock rate;
- 128MB DDR SGRAM in 8 Hynix 3.3 ns chips, 300 (600) MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
- Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1200 megapixels/sec and 2400 megatexels/sec.
So, it's the penultimate-generation High-End product from ATI (RADEON 9700 has been announced, but was unavailable to testers). Those willing to get some detailed information should read RADEON 8500 review. Certainly, being one f the fastest accelerators, this card aspires to compete with NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 and GeForce4 Ti 4200. Our review showed that 128MB are not the dead weight, like in case of GeForce3 Ti 200, but give the performance boost. Read all the details in our reviews:
Theoretical and analytical videocard reviews, containing
functional analysis of NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti GPU: ATI RADEON 8500
On the 10th of August 2002 the latest drivers from ATI are 6.102, 6.107, 6.118 for Windows XP.
I shall note there's
Radeon2.ru web-site that tracks all software novelties from ATI and offers improved drivers versions with preset registry settings for increasing RADEON cards perfomance.
As the drivers differences are equal for the both RADEON 8500 cards with DDR memory, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See ATI RADEON 8500 (275 MHz) section for more information about drivers.
With a great satisfaction I report that ATI programmers removed card's high results "adjustments" in versions 6.015 and higher, falsifying highest 3D quality settings in Quake3. AND NOW 6.* DRIVERS SUPPORT TRUE TRILINEAR FILTERING!!!
As there are no real application using Pixel Shaders 1.4. So, below are some demonstrations of one of water realization methods based on Pixel Shaders 1.4. you may compare these shots with X-Isle's water in the GeForce3 section, for example.
Pity again, but it's still impossible to demonstrate this technology at work
on examples of games or demos. The same X-Isle uses NVIDIA cards specificial
OpenGL extensions disabling this demo on non-GeForce cards. Certainly,
the above demo was made with PS 1.4, so it works with RADEON 8500
only. You can also pay attention to the new 3DMark2001 SE with pixel
shaders v1.4 test. Read more about it in the Gigabyte MAYA RADEON
8500 review.
Nevertheless, these technics allow to create masterpieces of 3D-graphics:
As it's known RADEON 8500 supports very interesting feature and advantage - N-Patches technology called TruForm. All details are in our
R200 analysis and in mentioned RADEON 8500 review. Screenshots below demonstrate TruForm capabilities for creating a detailed human face.
I want to recommend to read the review of Review of SuperGrace RADEON 7500/8500,
describing TRUEFORM technology in detail on the example of Serious
Sam.
Below are some screenshots taken on RADEON and reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3.
