December 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 7500 (270/460 MHz)

This chip is presented by Manli RADEON 7500 64MB (270/460 MHz), AGP videocard.

Features:

ATI RADEON 7500 chip, 270MHz clock rate;
64MB DDR SDRAM memory in eight ESMT 4ns microchips, 230 (460) MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 540 megapixels/sec and 1620 megatexels/sec with three texture blocks on each pipeline and 1080 megatexels/sec with two texture blocks on each pipeline.

Wasn't overclocked.

By the end of December the product belongs to the $50-70 range; supports DirectX 7.0; closest rival: GeForce4 MX440.

On the 10th of December 2002 the latest drivers version from ATI is 6.218 for Windows XP.

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.

Windows XP

You can see that the latest Windows XP drivers are good or rather identical. Still the newest 6.218 provides slightly higher performance and better stability. Some versions demonstrate problems with refresh rate setting. Known treatments are described Radeon2.ru. In the forum there you can also read about problems users of various ATI cards face with various drivers.

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.