ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

ATI can play the driver game too

NVIDIA clearly spoiled the preliminary introduction of the Radeon 8500 back in August with the release of their Detonator 4/XP drivers. We were told by NVIDIA that these new drivers would not only improve performance, but that they would be made publicly available the very same week we tested with them. Obviously, that didn't happen, and it ended up taking another month before the drivers were released. The performance gains were tangible, but the drivers weren't fit for release when NVIDIA provided them to the press and honestly shouldn't have been used. Hindsight being 20/20, we made a promise to ourselves that we would not allow any further performance enhancing drivers to be used in our video card reviews unless we could make the drivers publicly available to our readers immediately.

When ATI approached us regarding the final review of the Radeon 8500 they mentioned that they would be providing us with two sets of drivers; the first set would be the WHQL retail drivers (v 7.60) that would be bundled with every card and the second set would be a special "performance" driver that they wanted us to test with. Obviously we had issues with this so we tested under both and agreed to publish benchmarks from the "performance" driver only under the stipulation that ATI would release this performance driver to the public by the end of day today (10/17/2001). ATI was actually planning on releasing this driver in a couple of weeks but they graciously agreed to move that release date up in order to comply with our requests.

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This performance driver is not WHQL certified (v 7.60.04) but it actually didn't change performance in any of the games we tested in. The only benchmarks this special driver had any effect on were 3DMark 2001 and Villagemark; both Direct3D benchmarks and both of which are more theoretical tests than real world tests.

Despite this we definitely applaud ATI for their compliance with our request as they truly didn't have to. Also according to ATI they will consistently offer driver improvements for the Radeon 8500 much more so than they have for any other product.

However, ATI will definitely have to work hard if they plan on coming close to NVIDIA's ability to develop, execute and release drivers.