The Radeon 8500 is a card that is ahead of its time in terms of technology however the reports say that ATI have the same old problems with the drivers not being up to scratch. It was released to combat the Geforce 3 Ti 500 from Nvidia, and on paper should do a very good job of it, however due to the timing that needed to be kept the card had to be released without the drivers being fully developed. It is wise to keep updating the drivers while ATI is working on them. The link to the drivers can be found at the bottom of this page.

Features of the Radeon 8500 (from ATI)

Truform

ATI's Truform technology is designed to smooth out blocky triangles. Its not exactly an anti-aliasing method, it internally converts triangles in curved surfaces. To use this technology on older games, the games creators are releasing patches for the Radeon which allow this technology to work. The most famous one is that Counter-Strike will have a patch which greatly improves the look of the characters.

SmoothVision

SmoothVision is ATI's new multi-sampling Anti-aliasing technique. SmoothVision can improve performance by not anti-aliasing pixels that you cannot see on screen. Hidden triangles are left alone, decreasing the time it takes to AA a frame.

Hyper Z II

ATI claim that the Radeon 8500 has an unofficial theoretical memory bandwidth of 12Gb/s, the actual specs say it has 8.8Gb/s. This claim is down to its Hyper Z II technology. There are a combination of things that go into Hyper Z technology. In basic terms Hyper Z makes better use of the memory bandwidth it has, by making sure that pixels that don't need to be rendered aren't. Hyper Z II is an improved more efficient version of the original Hyper Z.

Charisma Engine II

The Charisma Engine is ATI's Transform and Lighting engine. It is not as fully programmable as the Geforce's. It works along side the SmartShader and its programmable vertex shader. The vertex shader is identical in features to that of the Geforce's vertex shader.

Pixel Tapestry II

In short its the ability of the Radeon to apply six textures in a single pass. Nvidia's cards currently only apply 4 textures. However they claim that no more is needed as games are still so far behind on this front that even the Nvidia cards have no need for all 4 pixel shaders. Its all part of becoming a fully directX8.1 card. Some of which games manufacturers and other neglect to use at the time. However ATI want all the features in to claim that its the most compatible DirectX 8 card on the market.

Product Specs.

Useful Links

Other Graphics card reviews.

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.

Geforce 2 MX - If your looking for a value card with a bit of grunt then this is the card you have been after. The Geforce 2 MX is based on the popular Geforce 2 GTS by Nvidia. Creative have also taken the hold of the Geforce 2 MX chipset from Nvidia and produced a card that will satisfy the vast majority of computer gamers. With a 350 Million Pixel per second fill rate and 2 3D rendering pipelines there is more than enough power to draw today's complex graphics. Read More...

Looking for the Geforce 4 ? Then you should be looking at the Geforce 4 Ti range. The Ti range offers more speed, more features and more quality. Not to mention the whopping great 128Mb of DDR RAM on everyone of the Geforce 4 Ti range. Featuring twin vertex shaders Lightspeed memory architecture II Accuview Anti-aliasing, NView and more. Click here for more information