ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Today's Radeon 8500

ATI was very rushed in the release of the Radeon 8500 for the main reason that they had a very small window of opportunity to succeed with this part. Immediately following NVIDIA's Titanium launch, ATI could assume that they wouldn't face any other competition until next year. If the Radeon 8500 could outperform the GeForce3 Ti 500 then ATI could have a performance leading part throughout the end of this year, hopefully gaining some additional clout among gamers; a segment in which they have trailed behind NVIDIA.

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For the past few weeks ATI has been shipping cards to retailers all over the globe. There have been a few delays that kept some cards from shipping out until recently, and ATI has held back review samples until this week after numerous delays which is why you see a delayed review here on AnandTech and on other websites. The delay doesn't bother us though since we're pleased just to be given the opportunity to test it, but we felt you should have some sort of an explanation as to why this article took so long to appear. ATI has actually taken the review rollout of this card very seriously and has distributed close to 360 Radeon 8500 boards worldwide to the press and analysts. For comparison purposes, the only launch recently that had such great exposure was AMD's launch of the Athlon back in 1999 with close to 400 review systems.

The card we were provided with was a sealed retail card clocked at the 275/275MHz (core/mem) frequency that all retail 8500 cards will be shipping. The board ships with three Valve titles; Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life: Uplink. Also included in the box is a DVI to 15-pin analog VGA connector to make use of the second video output which enables ATI's HydraVision multi monitor support.

The performance you will see in this review today is the performance you will get out of the card when you purchase it which was not the case when we first looked at the 8500.

The specifications and a discussion of the features of the chip can be found in our original Radeon 8500 article here.

Charisma Engine II

Pixel Tapesty II

HyperZ II

Video Immersion II

HydraVision

TRUFORM

SMOOTHVISION