These are the 8500 SMOOTHVISION enabled drivers we have been waiting for. They will be officially announced today at Comdex. Someone jumped the gun and posted them for about 5 minutes earlier yesterday but these drivers were pulled pretty quick. ATI are finally ready to deliver a new driver revision that improves performance and enables SMOOTHVISION.

Currently only for the 8500/8500LE set of cards. and Anandtech is giving them a shot here.

ATi Radeon 8500 Win9x & WinME Drivers v4.13.7206

ATi Radeon 8500 WinXP Drivers v6.13.3286

ATi Radeon 8500 Win2k Drivers v5.13.3286

Specific Improvements reported by NeoWin:

1. Nature performance has improved about 40-50% from 23 to 32FPS

2. Single Texturing fill-rate has been dramatically improved - 25 to 35% improvement

3. DOT3 Bump Mapping increased about 12%

4. Vertex Shader speeded by 10%

5. Pixel Shader speeded by 17-20% Local mirror