November 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 7500 (230/333 MHz)

This chip is presented by ATI RADEON 7500 64MB (230/333 MHz), AGP videocard.

Features:

ATI RADEON 7500 chip, 230MHz clock rate;
64MB DDR SDRAM memory in eight Hynix 5.5ns microchips, 166 (333) MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 520 megapixels/sec and 1560 megatexels/sec with three texture blocks on each pipeline and 1040 megatexels/sec with two texture blocks on each pipeline.

Wasn't overclocked.

In the beginning of December the product belongs to the $55-80 range; supports DirectX 7.0; closest rival: GeForce4 MX440.

On the 10th of November 2002 the latest drivers from ATI are 6.200 for Windows XP, 9.069 for Windows ME. The performance results are in the summary diagrams.

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.