ATI's Radeon 8500 - New drivers expose potential

Quake III Arena High Quality - 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 ATI Radeon 8500 217 209 | 0 | 43 | 87 | 130 | 174 | 217 | 260

The new drivers from ATI "fix" the Quake III Arena issue that was recently exposed. The image quality of the Radeon 8500 is now identical to that of the GeForce3. The performance between the two parts is under 4% which isn't noticeable.

Wolfenstein MP Test atdemo8 - 1024x768x32 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 ATI Radeon 8500 150 145 | 0 | 30 | 60 | 90 | 120 | 150 | 180

The new drivers also improve performance under Wolfenstein MP, now the GeForce3 Ti 500 only holds a 3% performance advantage over the Radeon 8500. According to ATI, their optimizations for the Quake III engine (not referring to the quack/quake issue) now work under all Quake III engine based games including Wolfenstein. The results are obvious but they get even more interesting as we crank up the resolution...

Wolfenstein MP Test atdemo8 - 1600x1200x32 ATI Radeon 8500 NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 112 105 | 0 | 22 | 45 | 67 | 90 | 112 | 134

Here's something we didn't expect to see; the Radeon 8500 is actually slightly faster than the Ti 500. The 6.7% performance advantage is a direct result of the new drivers and makes the 8500 much more competitive.