ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Black & White

A very different type of game than what you're used to seeing in these reviews, Black & White places you in control of a civilization as their god.  This Direct3D game relies on a high enough frame rate that navigating around your worshippers' villages does not seem choppy.  The user has a third person perspective of the world.

The game was set to 1024 x 768 x 32 with the preset maximum detail configuration used.  We used fraps to take the average frame rate during the intro scene with the family and their child journeying towards the water.  Note that the latest version of fraps does take an actual average frame rate so this is not an estimate.

The GeForce3 maintains a hefty lead over the competition here.  It's clear that the Radeon 8500's drivers are holding it back as it is unable to even outperform the Radeon 7500, which has less memory bandwidth in this test.

The Radeon itself does not do too well in this test; it offers a 20% higher frame rate than the GeForce2 MX400 but the Kyro II is able to outperform it by a similar margin.  It is clear that the GeForce2 Pro and GeForce3 are the best choices for Black & White. 

Improved drivers should help the Radeon 8500 run B&W a bit more competitively, but a 62% performance advantage by NVIDIA will be difficult to overcome.