Written By:
Date Posted: June 6, 2002

Overclocking

We had some decent success overclocking both our core and memory up to stck Radeon 8500 speeds (275/275), but after that, we encountered all kinds of issues. Long story short, the lack of ramsinks and a relatively small heatsink probably hurt us a little.

Benchmarking

AMD Athlon XP 2000+ (1.67GHz)
Asus A7V266-E
512MB Kingston DDR PC2100
2 x 80GB Maxtor 7200rpm ATA100, RAID-0
Soundblaster Live! Audigy

Windows XP Pro
VIA 4-in-1 v4.38
nVidia Detonators 28.32

3D Mark 2001 SE
Quake 3 Arena
Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Villagemark

Comparison Hardware:

Visiontek Xtasy 6964 GeForce 3 Ti500
ATi Radeon 8500 LE
Visiontek GeForce 4 Ti4600
PNY GeForce 4 Ti4600

We're including the GF4 Ti4600, knowing full well it'll dominate in the tests. We're doing this for a couple reasons. To begin with, the 8500 LE should be viewed as a budget card, but plenty of people want to know how much power you're sacrificing by saving 200$. Secondly, we already have the numbers, so we may as well throw them in. Realizing the Radeon 8500 and Ti500 may be outclassed for these tests, both are still fine cards for todays gamers. They were king of the hill a mere 2 months ago, and I'm including them simply for the sake of showing how far graphics speed has come. Because of the power of the modern video card, we're dropping all tests of below 1024x768 for the top end cards.

Quake 3: Arena

id Software's last game engine has spawned several excellent games since the release of Quake 3: Arena a few years ago. It's getting a little old, but many still use it as a measure of a video card's OpenGL performance. 1024x768 is a piece of cake for most new video cards now, so let's take a look, starting at 1280x1024.

Jacking up the resolution reveals that the Radeon 8500 can still maintain great framerates. Sure, it kinda (!) gets blown out of the water by the Ti4600s, but for a 100$ video card, it provides plenty of power.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

Grey Matter licensed the Quake engine to revive a classic. Return to Castle Wolfenstein uses a heavily modified Quake engine (it's actually modified Team Arena code), and therefore demands a more robust system to maintain Quake 3 framerates.

The Radeon pulls in respectable scores, though it tapers off at the maximum resolution. One thing I should add is that the Radeon, for some strange reason, drops to the desktop much faster than the GeForce 3 when you exit the game. We're talking about a difference of about 3-5 seconds here. Nothing too noteworthy, but just an interesting observation.

Jedi Knight 2

Jedi Knight 2 is latest game based on the excellent Quake 3 engine. The graphics have again been overhauled, and huge environments are the end result. This, of course, will strain your system more than Quake 3 did.

The Radeon falls behind at all resolutions. It's close at the lower resolutions, but we see a big hit at maximum resolution. I'm not really sure why the Radeon 8500 dropped to below 20fps, but this was my result with both the 6025 and 6043 drivers. We've tried ATI's latest, but our results were identical.

Previous Page - Introduction

Next Page - More Benchmarks