This chip is presented by ATI RADEON 9100 (8500LE) 128MB, AGP.
Features:
- ATI RADEON 9100 (8500LE) GPU, 250MHz clock rate;
- 128MB DDR SGRAM in 8 Infineon 3.6 ns chips; 250 (500) MHz clock rate; 128-bit bus;
- Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 1000 megapixels/sec and 2000 megatexels/sec.
Wasn't overclocked.
By the end of the month the product belongs to the $75-95 range; supports DirectX 8.1; closest rival: GeForce3 Ti 500.
Theoretical and analytical videocard reviews, containing functional analysis of ATI RADEON 8500
On June 10, 2003 the latest drivers from ATI are 6.360 and 6.368 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.
Some versions have problems with refresh rate setting in some resolutions.
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 3DMark2003 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 you know, RADEON 8500 supports the very interesting feature and advantage - N-Patches (TruForm). All details are in our
R200 analysis and in the mentioned RADEON 8500 review. Screenshots below demonstrate TruForm capabilities for creating a detailed human face.
I recommend you to read the SuperGrace RADEON 7500/8500 review describing TRUEFORM technology in detail on the example of Serious Sam.
