ATI's Radeon 8500: She's got potential

Max Payne

Short but sweet is the best way to describe Max Payne. The game will definitely leave you wanting more not only in terms of the game but in your hardware as well. We debuted this benchmark in our Detonator 4/XP and Radeon 8500 articles. The guys at 3D Center have great instructions on how to benchmark Max Payne (including how to use the AnandTech benchmark).

MaxPayne 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 NVIDIA GeForce3 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti 200 ATI Radeon 7500 NVIDIA GeForce2 Pro ATI Radeon 64DDR STMicro Kyro II 80.98 75.57 71.13 68.27 55.88 54.08 53.55 38.29 26.72 | 0 | 16 | 32 | 49 | 65 | 81 | 97

The standings continue to remain the same under Max Payne. This is actually quite interesting because 3DMark 2001 is based upon the Max Payne engine and the Radeon 8500 does extremely well under that benchmark yet is unable to outperform the GeForce3 Ti 200 under Max Payne. Max Payne is also a Direct3D game so ATI's claims of poor OpenGL performance aren't valid here either.

MaxPayne 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 53.25 45.57 40.54 39.76 26.78 25.74 23.9 19.41 12.18 | 0 | 11 | 21 | 32 | 43 | 53 | 64

At 1600 x 1200 the 8500 is able to come close to the GeForce3 once again, but it is still over 30% away from the GeForce3 Ti 500.