ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

UnrealTournament

Although at this point it's a better CPU benchmark than a video card benchmark, UnrealTournament as usual is a part of our standard test suite. We tested using the publicly available "Thunder" demo by Reverend.

We mentioned in our last review that ATI's drivers had a problem with UnrealTournament. The problem has not been solved in the latest driver build and basically results in vsync limited scores in spite of the fact that vsync is disabled in the drivers. This explains the poor performance of both the Radeon 8500 and 7500. ATI provided us with a fix for the solution by rebooting after disabling vsync but it did not work under Windows 2000.

Unreal Tournament 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro STMicro Kyro II ATI Radeon 8500 ATI Radeon 7500 ATI Radeon 64DDR 102.72 102.41 101.75 99.58 98.07 85.35 72.14 66.11 60.9 | 0 | 21 | 41 | 62 | 82 | 103 | 123

There's not much to say here except we'd like to see how the 8500 performs without the drivers limiting its performance.