GeForce3 Under Attack: ATi's Radeon 8500 Previewed

AquaNox- AquaMark

GeForce3 is easily beating Radeon 8500 in this one, which is a bit of surprising. This could either be a driver issue or a pixel shader issue. This game is hardly fill rate limited. Radeon 7500 is competing quite nicely with GeForce2 Pro.

Dronez - DronezMark

All the fancy vertex and pixel shader features as well as bump mapping had to be disabled for this benchmark run, because the game wouldn't enable those features on Radeon 8500. This is not a mistake of the ATi board, but of the game.

GeForce3 is able to win this one as well, although the edge over Radeon 8500 isn't big. Radeon 7500 is once more doing quite well against GeForce2 Pro.

Evolva

Evolva is a DirectX 7 game that makes heavy use of dot3 bump mapping. It is still a rather tough benchmark.

This is the first game that didn't really benefit from NVIDIA's Detonator 4 driver. Without the help of this driver GeForce3 is pretty much lost. Radeon 8500 wins all the way, although not with much of a distance.