image quality has a lot to do with your monitor as well....unless your friend bought an 8500LE that was not made by Ati....a 9000Pro is not "one generation better" as you put it here is what Anand says about it:
With four pixel rendering pipelines and two texture units per pipeline, it’s difficult to scale down the Radeon 8500’s R200 core to a small enough size that it can be sold in $149 cards. NVIDIA’s solution to this problem was to strip out all of the DirectX 8 programmability out of the GPU, leaving a GeForce2-like NV17 core (a.k.a. GeForce4 MX). ATI has taken a bit of a better approach, and instead of making the RV250 a non-DX8 part, they removed one texture unit from each pixel pipeline.
The benefit of the RV250’s architecture is that ATI can reduce die size significantly, while still maintaining competitive performance in games that make extensive use of only one or two textures. The obvious downside to this is that in future games where more textures are used (for example, Unreal Tournament 2003 makes use of four textures in some areas) the RV250 will be slower than the R200.
here is the only positive change made with the 9000Pro:
ATI also outfitted the RV250 core with their FULLSTREAM technology, which is a scaled down version of the pixel shader video technology found in the R300. The ability to run pixel shader programs on video streams is promising, and ATI’s FULLSTREAM technology is one such implementation. With appropriate software support (currently only through RealPlayer), FULLSTREAM can smooth out the blocky compression artifacts that are normally seen in low bandwidth video.
