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Originally posted by Cobra
Newbie-Overclocker is just being ignorant. With the lastest Catylyst drivers, the Radeon 8500 can keep up with a GF4 4200, and even beat it in games such as Jedi Knight 2, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Dungeon Siege and scores a few more points in 3dmark 2001 SE too. The only area in which a GF4 4200 is significantly faster is AA, but its a tradeoff since the R8500 is alot faster in AF. In the end, both these cards are blazing fast, and I'm suprised to see so many flamewars when both cards are neck-and-neck :)
That's what I've been saying in the first place. However, Newbie-Overclocker just flamed me, and said that a GeForce3 (the original GF3, not even the Ti500) can easily outperform the R8500 in games. Ohh, come on, most reviewers agree that the R8500 roughly matches the Ti4200 in performance and yet "Mr. Overclocker" would probably be the only person who would say otherwise. :rolleyes:
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The other possibility could be how ATI set up the drivers at default. When we benchmarked the 6071 drivers, we did not change anything in the control panels except to make sure Vsync was disabled for D3D and OpenGL. The same was also done for the Catalyst drivers. The default settings in the Catalyst drivers could be different than those of the 6071 drivers. There are some more options in the Catalyst driver control panel that are not available with the 6071 drivers. So perhaps image quality has been increased more which would sacrifice performance. In part 2 of our look into the Catalyst we are going to go over all these new features in the D3D and OGL control panels and we wanted to only go into this detail with the final drivers as it is certainly a lot of work. We will examine them to see exactly what they change in terms of IQ and how it effects performance. We will also do some comparisons of Smoothvision and Anisotropic to see if those have been improved in IQ or performance. We plan to also compare the filtering types and see if Mip-Mapping and Trilinear filtering image quality has been improved. It will be a much more in-depth analysis with the final build of the Catalyst drivers which should let you know just exactly how much better they are, if any.
ATI is changing, that much we think we can all agree on. They are more aggressive than ever in getting the end user what they want. They had serious driver problems in the past, but it is safe to say those problems are gone...for the moment. While the Radeon 8500 was not a GeForce3 killer at its introduction because of driver implementation, it's certainly closer to that now. If ATI could have implemented such robust drivers at the market launch of the 8500, the video card landscape might be a bit different from today. In fact, the 8500 is riding right up on the GeForce4 Ti 4200's heels. If you've been reluctant in the past to try out the 8500 because of driver problems, you may want to give it another shot now days. The 8500 can be found for bargain basement prices and it really delivers beyond bargain basement performance.
Newbie-Overclocker said that all the reviewers used High Performance mode and it provided no performance boost. This proves him wrong!! He said the R8500 doesn't even match the GF3, and yet, HardOCP says it is, and it's even right up there with the Ti4200. The term "riding right up on the GeForce4 Ti 4200's heels" basically means it's catching up the Ti4200.