This chip is presented by Gigabyte MAYA AP64SP-H Deluxe RADEON 8500 64MB, AGP card.

Let me explain why we marked this card's clock rate. ATI Technologies traditionally produces not single products but their lines. Until today company usually hid clock rates from users, shipping faster cards as Retail and slower as OEM. You can read more about it in the RADEON 64MB section.

Now the common sense prevailed and ATI officially divided RADEON 8500 into two products - 8500 and 8500LE. The latter has lower 250 MHz clock rate. So, not to confuse users we'll mark clock rates together with card name.

Features:

• ATI RADEON 8500 chip, 275MHz clock rate;
• 64MB DDR SDRAM in 8 Hynix 3.6 ns chips, 275 (550) MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
• Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1100 megapixels/sec and 2200 megatexels/sec.

Wasn't overclocked.

So, it's the one of the most powerful High-End products from ATI. Those willing to get some detailed information should read RADEON 8500 review. This card competes with NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500. I must admit that it's been hard to compete with RADEON 8500 from the point of pricing. And the most serious problem of these cards - their inaccessibility - is solved by mass shipments. However, more powerful GeForce4 Ti 4200 already threats latest ATI products. Besides, the release of RADEON 9000 introduced some uncertainty: on the one hand it must push RADEON 7500 out of the market, on the other - ATI is rumoured to cancel RADEON 8500 production after the new release. Read more about RADEON 8500 in our reviews:

Theoretical and analytical videocard reviews, containing functional analysis of NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti GPU: ATI RADEON 8500

• ATI RADEON 8500 review
• ATI RADEON 7500 review
• PowerMagic RADEON 7500/8500 review - concerns operation of the driver v7.206, including SmoothVision; estimates 3D quality of the RADEON 8500
• Manli and Sunrich RADEON 7500/8500 review - quality of operation of the SmoothVision; 3D quality of the RADEON 8500
• SuperGrace RADEON 7500/8500 - touches upon the TruForm technology
• Gigabyte MAYA AP64D-H RADEON 8500 Deluxe review - operation of Pixel Shaders in the Advanced Pixel Shader Test from 3DMark2001 SE
• Joytech Apollo RADEON 7500 SDR 64 MBytes, 128 MBytes review
• Joytech and Hercules ATI RADEON 8500LE cards - operation of 128 MBytes card based on the RADEON 8500LE
• Palit XpertVision RADEON 8500 on ATI RADEON 8500LE - operation of the Radeon 8500LE in RtCW, Comanche4 DEMO, 3DMark2001 SE
• Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H RADEON 8500 Deluxe 128 MBytes and Hercules 3D Prophet 8500 128 MBytes - operation of anisotropy (quality estimation) in 3DMark2001 SE, RtCW, Serious Sam:TSE, Comanche4 DEMO, Unreal Tournament 2003 DEM
• Review of Gigabyte MAYA AP128DG-H3 RADEON 8500 Deluxe 128MB 300/600 MHz

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.

Windows XP

All the latest drivers belong to the CATALYST serie. It's rather raw, causing a number of problems in games (see the details on 3Digest main page).

In particular, note the problems in IL2 with 6.118 version. Therefore, I think the penultimate official 6.071 version behaves more stable in most tests.

I want to attract you to versions 6.025 and higher. All of them have the feature of anisotropy forcing in Direct3D, described in the corresponding section. As Radeon does (though ambiguously) support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

Some versions demonstrate problems with refresh rate setting. Known treatments are described at Radeon2.ru. In the forum you can also read about problems users of various ATI cards face with various 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.