ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Final Words

First off, although we don't always see things the same way I definitely agree with Tom on his statements that ATI should not have chose to present the Radeon 8500 this soon.  Even had NVIDIA not released their Detonator 4 drivers earlier than expected, the Radeon 8500 was in no shape to be evaluated at all.  The drivers were buggy and they lacked support for the full Radeon 8500 feature set.  Although it's definitely interesting to see what the Radeon 8500 can do, ATI should be very worried that too many of you will get the wrong idea about the product.  All I can do is present you with the picture as I see it.

The next statement I'm about to make has been true for most of ATI's cards and it is that the Radeon 8500 has a lot of potential.  As usual, that potential is contingent on solid drivers which ATI has not been famous for in the past but they have been improving over time.  There is no doubt that the Radeon 8500's architecture and technology is sufficient to allow it to become a GeForce3 killer, however whether or not its drivers will allow it to is another question.

With features like TRUFORM and SMOOTHVISION that can offer tangible improvements today (or in the very near future), the Radeon 8500 could be the better choice of the two when it's released in September.  The only prohibitive factors would be the price which at $399 will be a tough buy for many and the drivers which will hopefully, for ATI's sake, improve significantly by the time the Radeon 8500 hits the streets.

For the home theater enthusiast crowd the Radeon 8500 also has incredible potential.  Improved de-interlacing capabilities as well as the ability to be paired with a very cheap DVI-I to Component converter (instead of the overpriced $200 mystery boxes that are sold now) make the 8500 very promising indeed.  Can anyone say All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500?

The Radeon 7500 unfortunately doesn't have as bright of a future. It's great that a higher performing part gets HydraVision support however the Radeon 7500 may end up being too little, too late by the time it hits the streets. The 7500 should've been released much, much sooner. We had internal benchmarks from ATI of a Radeon clocked at 250/250MHz DDR (core/memory) in February, it shouldn't have taken this long for the card to surface. ATI had better aggressively price the offering otherwise they're going to be getting some pretty tough competition from NVIDIA.

In the end, is the Radeon 8500 a poor choice for you, the consumer?  There's a reason I called this a preview.