Two new cards from ATI this year are the Radeon 7500 and the 8500. As you may well of guessed the 7500 is more for the budget market and the 8500 is for the power users. The 7500 is a revamped version of the original |Radeon. A Radeon on steroids if you like.

Although its faster than the original Radeon, its a little late to be competing at the price range it has been set at. Its competing with the Geforce 2 pro and the Geforce 2 Ti. And in any real life benchmarks the results are that both of these cards beat the Radeon into 3rd place. That is until you start to push the resolution up to 1600x1200 anybody out there running at such a high res will be impressed by the way the Radeon holds up. Its seems that the Radeon doesn't have the raw power in this version to pump out 150fps in the top games, but the resolution is increased the Radeon bears the weight and keeps on plugging away regardless. while other cards drop.

Example of benchmarks Unreal Tournament.

As you can clearly see from these example benchmarks the Radeon 7500 is hardly affected by the resolution increase. Lets do some quick calculations on the performance loss due to the resolution increase.

Looking at the table above, you can see that the Radeon 7500's power to keep up with the resolution is astounding. The Geforce 3 gives a credible result, while the Geforce 2 range of cards along with the original Radeon lose almost half of the performance.

Features of the Radeon 7500 (from ATI)

• CHARISMA ENGINE™

• HYPER Z™ technology

• PIXEL TAPESTRY™ architecture

• VIDEO IMMERSION™ technology

• Integrated Transformation, Clipping and Lighting

• Twin Cache Architecture

• Superscalar Rendering

• Single-Pass Multi-Texturing

• True Colour Rendering

• Triangle Setup Engine

• Texture Cache

• Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering

• Line & Edge Anti-Aliasing

• Full-Screen Anti-Aliasing

• Texture Compositing

• Texture Decompression

• Secular Highlights

• Perspectively Correct Texture

• Mapping

• Mip-Mapping

• Z-Buffering and Double-Buffering

• Emboss, Dot Product 3 and Environment bump mapping

• Spherical, Dual-Parabolic and Cubic environment mapping

• Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing

Hyper Z

So what exactly is Hyper Z? A big deal has been made of this from ATI, its has actually kept there cards up to speed with the rest. Hyper Z is technology that makes better use of the limited memory bandwidth that graphics cards have. There are two main parts of the Hyper Z technology, the first is "fast Z clear" A method of clearing the Z buffer without having to write zero's this saves memory bandwidth. The second and probably most important is the "Hierarchical Z" technology. This determines if a rendered pixel will actually be seen on the screen or if its located behind another object. If its determined that the pixel will not be seen the pixel will not be rendered and so again valuable memory bandwidth is saved.

Charisma Engine

The Charisma Engine is the part of the card that does all the T&L work as well as vertex skinning and all manner of other 3D effects. The perfect place to read about the Charisma Engine is at this (seems to be down) Article at Radeonic.

Pixel Tapestry

This is all about the texture system how its performed. and the advantages of having 3 filtered textures per pixels as opposed to 2 on most other cards on the market. Again rather than get into to much detail on this site. Radeonic have again got the perfect article on Pixel Tapestry here (seems to be down)

Its actually quite difficult to find the best situation for this card. The only one that really springs to mind is if you really want to play games at very high resolutions but cant afford the Radeon 8500 of Geforce 3 Ti 500. In this unfortunate circumstance then this is your best bet, as it hold its own at 1600x1200. But its certainly not the fastest overall. Its also not the cheapest. Maybe the price will drop and this card will become more appealing. It has a blistering core clock speed. 40Mhz faster than anything else on the market at its time of release.

Again you want to be looking at the Radeon for its technology and the beauty of the graphics it produces rather than its raw power. ATI work hard on improving the graphics quality and technologies that help the graphics industry rather than bumping in large peak fill rates. Its not good from a marketing point of view, but you have to admire what they are trying to do. The Radeon 8500 

Product Specs.

Useful Links

Other Graphics card reviews.

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Not sure about upgrading your video card yourself? Head of to the Panther Products guide to installing a video card to see how easy it really is.

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