ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Serious Sam

Serious Sam is an excellent creation from a previously unheard of development house.  The game is a first person shooter in the purest form of the name.  It features high quality textures and a very flexible OpenGL engine that allows the end user to control virtually every performance and quality aspect of the game.  For these tests, every single quality option was set to the maximum level with the exception of anisotropic filtering which was disabled. 

The benchmark was run at 1024 x 768 x 32 and the average without excessive peaks was recorded. 

Here the Radeon 8500 is much more competitive than in Black & White.  ATI needs to make up a 24% deficit to the GeForce3 if the Radeon 8500 is to perform equally to NVIDIA's solution.

The Radeon 7500 offers performance virtually identical to the GeForce2 Pro; here it is a bit faster.  The real downside is that the Radeon 7500 will carry a retail price of $199 while the GeForce2 Pro is already $30 - 50 below that.

The Kyro II is not as impressive as we once thought, especially now that all of the quality settings are turned up to the max.  It's a better solution than the GeForce2 MX400 and it should offer performance close to that of the GeForce2 GTS but it is definitely not the GeForce2 Ultra killer we originally thought it to be.

One of the most useful features of Serious Sam is its ability to provide you with a real world fill rate benchmark.  Remember how we mentioned that manufacturer quoted fill rate numbers are generally misleading?  The Radeon 8500 has a peak fill rate of 1 Gigapixels/s, yet in Serious Sam its fill rate never breaks 454 Megapixels/s.  Memory bandwidth and driver limitations are holding the Radeon 8500 back here.  Since the Radeon 8500 has more memory bandwidth than the GeForce3 and a higher fill rate, it should theoretically be scoring higher in this test.  The fact that it doesn't outperform the GeForce3 points at the drivers as the culprit.  Luckily for ATI, they have until September to improve the drivers before they get this card on store shelves.

The Radeon 7500 obtains its performance advantage over the GeForce2 Pro by a slightly higher fill rate, which is made clear by this benchmark.

The Kyro II also has a small fill rate advantage over the GeForce2 MX400, which translates into a real world performance advantage in the Serious Sam benchmark.