How about the poor mortals like us? We still have Radeon 8500!

You act as though the 8500 is a pile of tightly coiled dog crap.

R250's are pretty potent GPUs. We don't have nearly the processing power of cards that are a year younger then us...BIG SURPRISE!!! However if you look at it from the prespective of a weighted potence. The 8500 is wicked powerful considering how old it is.

Kinda like how the GF2's where up until about 10-14 months ago. They weren't Eye Candy cards in their old years but they could still kick out decent frames with a decent resolution at moderate detail levels.

1) Work
2) Save up your money
3) Rob a bank


I picked number 2), all the money I got from my grandparents and stuff since I think 8th grade, I saved it up. Today, its $2000 total, and going strong baby :D And that budget no longer includes the screen, since I am getting reimbursed for the $476 I wasted on this other LCD, I am at $2000 flat :D

I was also sseking all around the Internet on our 8500's future with HL2, which looked kind of dark to me when I saw the latest benchmarks, with Radeon 9600's being almost barely acceptable for the game. I don't know if my good ol' 1700+ pally with the 128MB retail will be good enough for it :confused:

Well let's look at it this way. A Ti4600 actually does pretty decently although it was running at DX8 mode in the Anand review. This game is all about shaders and AFAIK, the R8500/LE has very strong shaders. I can see the 8500/LE doing as well, if not better than a Ti4600 under DX8/8.1 mode. Sure you'll sacrafice some shading available under PS2.0, but hopefully you won't spend too much time gawking at the water instead of killing aliens or whatever..;) :D

I agree that the 8500LE still has it's touch.

I have:
p3 750
8500LE
512MB (sdram)

I can still play all games, (boy does BF 1942 bring it to it's knees :o ) but it's playable.


Good thing I'm buying a new computer :D

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Originally posted by freedonX
I agree that the 8500LE still has it's touch.

I have:
p3 750
8500LE
512MB (sdram)

I can still play all games, (boy does BF 1942 bring it to it's knees :o ) but it's playable.


Good thing I'm buying a new computer :D

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I play BF 1942 and Desert Storm all the time at 1024x768 at high detail with no slow down I can notice. You may have a problem with the game but believe me it,s not your cards fault.

I don't blame the card, I would think the slow cpu

A lot of games nowadays (UT2003, BF1942) are very CPU dependent. Just like when you play with no bots in UT, you can get skyrocketing FRs, but add a few bots and it quickly consumes CPU power.

I have a retail 8500 with a PIII800. When I get the money for a new system it will probably be a 2500+ barton and I plan on using the 8500 so it is not such a bad card. I can upgrade to a RADEON2500000 or NVIDIA1500000 or whatever later on.

yeah rob a bank.

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Originally posted by soupnazi
I wish I had a Geforce 2 Ultra. Those used to be monsters.:D

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you know whats funny? there was an old commercial for halo and geforce2 gts. It was all about the great framerates and showed all these xbox scene of people firing gun, on the xbox's geforce 3.5.
Well anyway, I go tthe halo PC beta 1.5 and it barely runs on my geforce 4 4200, I have to put it at 1024x724. Plus it dont ahve dx 9 stuff. For the fun of it I threw my geforce 2 back in my lappy and tried halo beta and it wouldnt load (9000m got my 800x600 with all settings) I laugh at the irony. I bet the 9800 is gonna be awesome on it. And as I ramble on I might add some conspracy that this was al ment to happen because M$ new they were gonna switch to ATI for the xbox.

/ramble

Quote:

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Originally posted by GetCarter
1) Work
2) Save up your money
3) Rob a bank


I picked number 2), all the money I got from my grandparents and stuff since I think 8th grade, I saved it up. Today, its $2000 total, and going strong baby :D And that budget no longer includes the screen, since I am getting reimbursed for the $476 I wasted on this other LCD, I am at $2000 flat :D

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I did #3 couple months ago, that is how I got my new rig.

:D :D :D :D (Just kidding around).

I worked hard for this rig. Therefore, I am going to play hard with it too. :)

Have a nice day!!!!

Computer Maniac :)

Quote:

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Originally posted by Chuck232
Well let's look at it this way. A Ti4600 actually does pretty decently although it was running at DX8 mode in the Anand review. This game is all about shaders and AFAIK, the R8500/LE has very strong shaders. I can see the 8500/LE doing as well, if not better than a Ti4600 under DX8/8.1 mode. Sure you'll sacrafice some shading available under PS2.0, but hopefully you won't spend too much time gawking at the water instead of killing aliens or whatever..;) :D

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Better than a 4600? I have never seen any benchmark ever where the 8500LE beat the Ti4600...

No we have not, and that's probably because games since now didn't stress the shaders nearly as much as HL2 does/will. Which is why I'm putting out the idea that the R8500 may be "better" than the Ti4200/4400/4600 series.

also, is it the Geforce 4 or 3 that only had up to 1.3 shader spec? the 8500/le/9000/9100/9200 (god there are to many based on the 8500) use the newer 1.4 spec, from what i read, the main diffrence is the 1.4 lets it do most of the shaders in one pass, instead of 2 like the 1.3/1.1 spec (this was in the doom 3 update by john at one point) so if hl2 has (1.4) shader specs programed in along with it, and say the 8500 uses those, and the geforce goes to use the 1.3, then the 8500's should (should) never know untill some benchmarks really look at just that, perform better (in shaders)

(just dug it up) from his .plan update awhile ago.

"The fragment level processing is clearly way better on the 8500 than on the Nvidia products, including the latest GF4. You have six individual textures, but you can access the textures twice, giving up to eleven possible texture accesses in a single pass, and the dependent texture operation is much more sensible. This wound up being a perfect fit for Doom, because the standard path could be implemented with six unique textures, but required one texture (a normalization cube map) to be accessed twice. The vast majority of Doom light / surface interaction rendering will be a single pass on the 8500, in contrast to two or three passes, depending on the number of color components in a light, for GF3/GF4."