Yesterday was Nvidia's greatest I imagine. Loads of GeForce 4 information was given and previews and reviews appeared like magic mushrooms in wonderland. Some sites did test the new cards against "old" GeForce 3 and ATI Radeon 8500 cards. When I browsed through those I made an interesting discovery though. Compared against Nvidia and especially in context of the test systems used the Radeon 8500 performed pretty bad. Well here on my working PC the situation is better than the benchmarks on other sites make you believe... Note: To avoid confusion this article is about ATI Radeon 8500 performance ONLY.

The Geforce 4 is indeed an impressive product and reclaims the graphic cards throne from ATI. But my findings are that the results of the 8500 are somewhat too slow if I compare them to my system. Here are Anandtech's findings in 3DMark 2001: System: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ ASUS A7V266-E Windows XP ATI cards used the latest 7.66 beta drivers a.k.a 6.13.106025 ATI Radeon 8500 Overall: 8526
Game 1 - Car Chase - Low Detail: 132.6 FPS
Game 1 - Car Chase - High Detail: 47.9 FPS
Game 2 - Dragothic - Low Detail: 133.2 FPS
Game 2 - Dragothic - High Detail: 79.5 FPS
Game 3 - Lobby - Low Detail: 128.3 FPS
Game 3 - Lobby - High Detail: 57.7 FPS
Game 4 - Nature: 44.2 FPS
Fill Rate (Single Textured): 819
Fill Rate (Multi Textured): 1807
High Poly Count (1 light): 36 FPS
High Poly Count (8 lights): 9.7 FPS
EMBM: 112.6 FPS
DOT3: 87.6 FPS
Vertex Shader: 87.4 FPS
Pixel Shader: 101.5 FPS
Point Sprites: 28.1 FPS
Chip.de Benchmarks also based on Athlon XP 2000+: ATI Radeon 8500: 8528 Now take a look @ my results: Test System: Athlon XP1800+ 512MB DDR 266 Abit KR7A RAID Windows XP 6.13.10.6025 drivers NOTHING overclocked Shouldn't the Radeon 8500 perform better on an Athlon XP 2000+ than on my XP1800+? The results are nearly identical...
When you look up the Radeon 8500 with an XP2000+ in MadOnions ORB nearly all results lie above 9000 points. Tell us something about your results..