chuckchippie
10-15-01, 05:39 PM
Here it is:
"We really liked the original Radeon chipset, but for much of the last year, we've been dissapointed with the Radeon boards. Not because of image quality (which is great), and not because of performance (which is more than adequate for almost all games). No, we've been frustrated with the frequency of ATI's driver updates. For a long time there simply weren't any, despite the fact that a large number of Radeon users were screaming for bug fixes for such games as Tribes 2 and Asheron's Call. At press time (late september), the latest public for the original Readon was four months old and getting smellier every day. All this sordid history compelled us to test the drivers for ATI's new flagship with utmost scrutiny.
The first set of drivers sent to us for reviews were bumpy, causing crashes in Max Payne and Serious Sam and terrible visual artifacts in our Quake III Arena benchmark. But the final shipping drivers we eventually recieved fixed these probelms. Finally confident that ATI's software was playing ball with us, we were astounded by both the 8500's benchmark numbers and the visual quality of everything we saw during testing.
ATI's seemingly gimmicky Trueform technology--which uses the lighting data associated with each vertex to apply round curves to models where appropriate--has made a difference in the animation of models. It's especially visible when you look at the wings of the dragon in the 3DMark2001 Game 2 benchmark, and anywhere else where vertex mesh deformation is used to animate joints that move through multiple dimensions simultaneously. When compared to the GeForce3, the Radeon 8500 is the clear visual-quality winner, even in games that don't explicitly support the Radeon's new rendering tricks.
The 8500's stunningly fast 275 MHz core and 275 MHz DDR memory powered through our Quake III demo and 3DMark2001 Game 4 test, beating the fastest GeForce3 by 9.6fps and 4fps respectively (though it must be noted that a looming nVidia driver revision might close this gap). The only blemish on an otherwise perfect benchmark runwas a failure to run the Aquamark benchmark. Our guess is that there's is that there's an incompatalbility with the DirectX pixel spec Aquamark uses and the one Radeon uses, which brings us to the crux of our gripe with the Radeon 8500.
Each of the cool pixel shader effects that you see in programmable shader games--such as the shiny, reflective bumpmaps included in the 3DMark2001 Nature benchmark--are written using a pixel shader language. In DirectX 8.1, there are three different versions of the language. Both the GeForce3 and the Radeon 8500 understand version 1.2 of the pixel shader spec, which was essentially defined by nVidia and adopted by Microsoft in DirectX 8 because Microsoft didn't have a better spec of its own. But now ATI--some six months late to the programmable shader party--is introducing a new way to program pixel shaders, and it's a way that's incompatable with non-ATI cards. These instructions are defined by the 1.4 b=version of the pixel shader spec, a version Microsoft should never have approved (in our opinion).
Version 1.4 allows developers to take full advantage of the 8500's more advanced pixel shaders, but it also forces developers to write two different pieces of code--one for the 8500, and one for the GeForce3--in order to accomplish the exact same thing. The upshot is that developers probably won't go to such great lengths, and as a result, they'll default to the lowest common denominator and avoid the more advanced features of either 3D card family. We'll do out best to explain more in next month's Quick Start section.
For sheer speed and image quality, the Radeon 8500 is the best 3D card available today--but boy, oh boy, we're worried about its driver stability. We're giving the Radeon 8500 a 10 verdict, because it wouldn't be fair to ding it for problems that haven't yet occurred. But you can rest assured we'll be watching the card very closely and reporting on snafus, should any arise.
Pros: Wow, it's fast! And you can connect the board to an HDTV using a common DB-15-to-5 component video cable.
Cons: ATI's driver history and a fractured pixel shader spec gives us the willies. Will all our games play properly in the future?
Score= 10/10!!
And it won the Maximum PC KICKASS Product award.
The Specs:
Core-275 MHz R200 chip
Memory-275 MHz DDR SDRAM
8Max Res-2048x1536x32
Benchmarks:
Quake MPC demo-61.0fps
3DMark2001 Game 2 high detail-60.2fps
3DMark2001 Game 4-18.2fps
Aquamark-Didn't run
(These are on our 1.3GHz HP Pentium 4 testbed using the 4.13.7816 ATI driver)
"We really liked the original Radeon chipset, but for much of the last year, we've been dissapointed with the Radeon boards. Not because of image quality (which is great), and not because of performance (which is more than adequate for almost all games). No, we've been frustrated with the frequency of ATI's driver updates. For a long time there simply weren't any, despite the fact that a large number of Radeon users were screaming for bug fixes for such games as Tribes 2 and Asheron's Call. At press time (late september), the latest public for the original Readon was four months old and getting smellier every day. All this sordid history compelled us to test the drivers for ATI's new flagship with utmost scrutiny.
The first set of drivers sent to us for reviews were bumpy, causing crashes in Max Payne and Serious Sam and terrible visual artifacts in our Quake III Arena benchmark. But the final shipping drivers we eventually recieved fixed these probelms. Finally confident that ATI's software was playing ball with us, we were astounded by both the 8500's benchmark numbers and the visual quality of everything we saw during testing.
ATI's seemingly gimmicky Trueform technology--which uses the lighting data associated with each vertex to apply round curves to models where appropriate--has made a difference in the animation of models. It's especially visible when you look at the wings of the dragon in the 3DMark2001 Game 2 benchmark, and anywhere else where vertex mesh deformation is used to animate joints that move through multiple dimensions simultaneously. When compared to the GeForce3, the Radeon 8500 is the clear visual-quality winner, even in games that don't explicitly support the Radeon's new rendering tricks.
The 8500's stunningly fast 275 MHz core and 275 MHz DDR memory powered through our Quake III demo and 3DMark2001 Game 4 test, beating the fastest GeForce3 by 9.6fps and 4fps respectively (though it must be noted that a looming nVidia driver revision might close this gap). The only blemish on an otherwise perfect benchmark runwas a failure to run the Aquamark benchmark. Our guess is that there's is that there's an incompatalbility with the DirectX pixel spec Aquamark uses and the one Radeon uses, which brings us to the crux of our gripe with the Radeon 8500.
Each of the cool pixel shader effects that you see in programmable shader games--such as the shiny, reflective bumpmaps included in the 3DMark2001 Nature benchmark--are written using a pixel shader language. In DirectX 8.1, there are three different versions of the language. Both the GeForce3 and the Radeon 8500 understand version 1.2 of the pixel shader spec, which was essentially defined by nVidia and adopted by Microsoft in DirectX 8 because Microsoft didn't have a better spec of its own. But now ATI--some six months late to the programmable shader party--is introducing a new way to program pixel shaders, and it's a way that's incompatable with non-ATI cards. These instructions are defined by the 1.4 b=version of the pixel shader spec, a version Microsoft should never have approved (in our opinion).
Version 1.4 allows developers to take full advantage of the 8500's more advanced pixel shaders, but it also forces developers to write two different pieces of code--one for the 8500, and one for the GeForce3--in order to accomplish the exact same thing. The upshot is that developers probably won't go to such great lengths, and as a result, they'll default to the lowest common denominator and avoid the more advanced features of either 3D card family. We'll do out best to explain more in next month's Quick Start section.
For sheer speed and image quality, the Radeon 8500 is the best 3D card available today--but boy, oh boy, we're worried about its driver stability. We're giving the Radeon 8500 a 10 verdict, because it wouldn't be fair to ding it for problems that haven't yet occurred. But you can rest assured we'll be watching the card very closely and reporting on snafus, should any arise.
Pros: Wow, it's fast! And you can connect the board to an HDTV using a common DB-15-to-5 component video cable.
Cons: ATI's driver history and a fractured pixel shader spec gives us the willies. Will all our games play properly in the future?
Score= 10/10!!
And it won the Maximum PC KICKASS Product award.
The Specs:
Core-275 MHz R200 chip
Memory-275 MHz DDR SDRAM
8Max Res-2048x1536x32
Benchmarks:
Quake MPC demo-61.0fps
3DMark2001 Game 2 high detail-60.2fps
3DMark2001 Game 4-18.2fps
Aquamark-Didn't run
(These are on our 1.3GHz HP Pentium 4 testbed using the 4.13.7816 ATI driver)