March 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 7500 128 MBytes SDR (200/166 MHz)

This chip is presented by Joytech RADEON 7500 128 MBytes SDR, AGP videocard.

Features:

ATI RADEON 7500 chip, 200 MHz clock rate;
128 MBytes SDR SDRAM memory in eight MPLus 6ns microchips, 166 MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 400 megapixels/sec and 1200 megatexels/sec with three texture blocks on each pipeline and 800 megatexels/sec with two texture blocks on each pipeline.

Wasn't overclocked.

As I've already said in the RADEON 7500 section, the market is full of cards by ATI partners that have lowered core clock rates, besides original cards by ATI itself that work at the highest clock rates. But still these are complete RADEON 7500 cards with DDR memory that more or less successfully compete with NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro/Ti. But now the market have such "stumps" that it's even morally hard to call them RADEON 7500. They have SDR memory (not the fastest) and slow 200 MHz chip, so they can compete only with old RADEON DDRs. They have only one good feature - their relatively low price. You can read about these cards in detail in the 128 MBytes cards.

For the 10th of March 2002 the latest drivers from ATI are 9.009, 9.017, 9.021 for Windows 9x/ME and 6.037, 6.043 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.

And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature - filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support anisotropic filtering.

Due to the fact that Radeon does support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

Below are some screenshots taken on RADEON and reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3. Pay attention to Need For Speed: Porshe 2000. As we've already said all cards by ATI lack fog in this game. But it can be enabled either with the help of RadeonTweaker utility (download the latest version from ATINFO) or by means of manual registry editing. You'll need to enable WFogEnable and TableFogEnable. This method proved to be efficient with 7.041, 7.131, 7.153 versions.