ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

Max Payne

A very new and very popular game, Max Payne's engine is actually used in 3DMark 2001.  We felt a bit better using the game itself to gauge performance so we devised a quick little way to test the game along with the help of a very gracious Sami Vanhatalo of Remedy.  This test measures the average frame rate during the cut scene between chapters 4 & 5 of Part I of Max Payne.  While the frame rate isn't as accurate as actual gameplay would be, the averages we came out with ended up being pretty close to what average frame rates were in most cases during the game. 

We used the 'showextendedfps' command to average the frame rate and we modified the AveragedFrames variable to average more than the past 120 frames when calculating the average frame rate.  The test was reproducible within 0.5 – 1 fps in most cases making it a keeper for us.  We did not make this change in the benchmarks we ran for our Detonator 4 article so don't compare the two.

The Radeon 8500 does pretty well here but it is unable to out perform the GeForce3 once again. 

3DMark 2001

Although we're not big fans of using 3DMark 2001, we have included the numbers here to provide somewhat of a theoretical comparison between cards.

3DMark 2001 actually sheds some light on a few issues. First of all the Radeon 8500 does have a higher fill rate than the GeForce3 which was originally expected but denounced by the Serious Sam fill rate scores (potentially caused by poor OpenGL drivers?). Secondly, the GeForce3 beat the Radeon 8500 in the Pixel Shader test which could explain the poor performance under AquaMark. Third, the Radeon 8500 had a huge advantage in the Vertex Shader test which could explain the DroneZ results which was the first time that ATI actually outperformed the GeForce3 instead of falling behind by 10 - 30%.

According to 3DMark 2001 the Radeon also has a superior T&L engine and is capable of quicker point sprite calculation than the GeForce3. This is probably way ATI will be showing off their waterfall demo quite often with the Radeon 8500 since it makes thorough use of point sprites.