ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Quake III Arena

This game needs no introduction.  Quake III Arena has been with us longer than any other game benchmark and it has continued to serve us very well.  We used the 1.29g patch and the video options set to the default High Quality settings.  The resolution was adjusted to 1024 x 768 and demo 'four' was the time demo benchmark.

Again the GeForce3 comes out on top, but this time around the advantage is cut down to 15%.  The Radeon 8500 still has quite a way to go before it can be competitive with the GeForce3, but again we must stress that it's still preproduction hardware and drivers. 

The Radeon 7500 remains competitive with the GeForce2 Pro although for users purchasing cards in September it may be a difficult sell because of NVIDIA's GeForce2 Pro replacement.

Half Life: Counterstrike

Although we talk about the need for games to take advantage of new features in order for these cards to do well, one of the most overlooked factors is gameplay.  The incredibly popular Counterstrike mod for Half-Life provides exactly that.  Based on the Quake 2 engine, this game is played more frequently than any of the other first person shooters on the market today. 

We tested using TotalVR's Devestator demo using the latest Half-Life and Counterstrike patches at 1024 x 768.  Since the demo varied so much in frame rate, we reran the benchmark until the frame rate started to level off.

As you can tell by the frame rates, it's not hard to put together a system that can perform well under Counterstrike.  The GeForce3 pulls an impressive 180 fps and because the demo doesn't tax the memory subsystem of the GeForce2 Pro, much less the GeForce3, they reach the same frame rate.

There is no reason the Radeon 8500 shouldn't be running at similar frame rates and, while it is competitive, with further driver improvements the picture should clear up tremendously.