ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Wolfenstein MP Test

In the tradition of id releases, the upcoming Return to Castle Wolfenstein game was introduced in a publicly available Multiplayer Online Test. If you haven't tried the game yet we suggest downloading a copy and enjoying it yourself. The game is based on a modified version of the Quake III engine with an updated look to the graphics. We recorded two quick demos for this test by hopping on a random online server and going at it for a few; one outside on the beach with many players visible and some very big explosions and the other inside the compound with very few players. You can download the two demos here.

We tested with the built in "High Quality" settings enabled and texture filtering changed from Bilinear to Trilinear. To run the benchmark do the following:

1) Extract the demo files to c:\PathToWolfMPTest\demomain\demos\
2) Bring down the console by hitting the '~' key
3) Type 'timedemo 1' and hit enter
4) Type 'demo atdemo6' and hit enter to run the first demo, or 'demo atdemo8' to run the second demo

We chose atdemo8 for this comparison since it is more video card bound while atdemo6 is more of a CPU test.

Wolfenstein MP Test atdemo8 - 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 ATI Radeon 8500 ATI Radeon 7500 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon 64DDR STMicro Kyro II 142 139.4 135.8 129.2 115.7 114.1 112.3 89.4 84.5 | 0 | 28 | 57 | 85 | 114 | 142 | 170

Although it's based on the same engine as Quake III Arena, the standings do change a bit with the Radeon 8500 falling about 5% below the GeForce3 Ti 200. The only card that is able to hold a respectable lead over the Radeon 8500 is the GeForce3 Ti 500 at 10%.

Wolfenstein MP Test atdemo8 - 1600x1200x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 ATI Radeon 7500 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon 64DDR STMicro Kyro II 103.4 90.4 86.4 79 61.2 52.6 51.2 42.8 33 | 0 | 21 | 41 | 62 | 83 | 103 | 124

Remember how we said that Quake III Arena wasn't memory bandwidth intensive enough even at 1600 x 1200? The picture changes with Wolfenstein as the Radeon 8500's memory bandwidth advantage gets it above the GeForce3 Ti 200. Unfortunately for ATI, raw power isn't everything and they fall short of the gold yet again. At this point you should realize that there is a lot of untapped power in the Radeon 8500 but the only question is when will it be tapped, if ever.