ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Driver Performance: Windows 98 vs. Windows 2000 vs. Windows XP

We first introduced this section in the Radeon 8500 Preview and we are bringing it back again to see if there are any performance issues caused by our decision to use Windows 2000 SP2 as the benchmarking OS of choice. If you look back at our preview you'll note that the performance gap between 9x/Me and 2000/XP was not as large as it once was.

The performance of both cards under Serious Sam, Quake III Arena and Wolfenstein thankfully does not change much as you make the transition from one OS to the next. The vsync problem with the Radeon 8500 drivers is no present under Windows 9x/Me allowing UnrealTournament to run much faster under that OS than Windows 2000. It is worth noting that the Radeon 8500 comes very close to the GeForce3 Ti 500's performance in that benchmark with the vsync issue eliminated.

Under Max Payne, performance has improved considerably since we originally looked at the card but the majority of the performance increases are under Windows 9x/Me. While it's arguable that 9x/Me is more of a gamer's OS choice, neither OS is very stable and the future of Windows is in the NT based OSes (2000/XP) so ATI and NVIDIA should be focusing on performance there. NVIDIA seems to be doing fine but ATI still has some room for improvement.