Thomas Pabst did it. He's the first with an online review of ATI latest product. Interesting are the facts he has to offer: The current driver set 4.13.7191 for Radeon 8500 does not support SmoothVision, ATi's multi sampling FSAA solution, but only the old super sampling FSAA instead, which allows only inferior FSAA performance. In fact, SmoothVision has not yet been enabled in any driver, but it is supposed to be added by the end of this month.
The current driver is known to have issues with Athlon systems, but is supposed to run fine with Pentium 4 systems.
Tests showed that the new WindowsXP-driver does not perform stable. It is also showing inferior 3D-performance compared to Win9x or Win2000.
Testing the advanced features of Radeon 8500 with the DX8 vertex/pixel shader OpenGL demo programs "Dronez" or "GLMark" is not possible or sensible, because both programs are using NVIDIA-specific extensions that only work on NVIDIA's GeForce3 family of 3D-cards. This allows Radeon 8500 to only run in DX7 mode, which is not very helpful for comparison purposes.
For the usual scoop of Tom's reviews click here.
The current driver is known to have issues with Athlon systems, but is supposed to run fine with Pentium 4 systems.
Tests showed that the new WindowsXP-driver does not perform stable. It is also showing inferior 3D-performance compared to Win9x or Win2000.
Testing the advanced features of Radeon 8500 with the DX8 vertex/pixel shader OpenGL demo programs "Dronez" or "GLMark" is not possible or sensible, because both programs are using NVIDIA-specific extensions that only work on NVIDIA's GeForce3 family of 3D-cards. This allows Radeon 8500 to only run in DX7 mode, which is not very helpful for comparison purposes.
For the usual scoop of Tom's reviews click here.
