GeForce3 Under Attack: ATi's Radeon 8500 Previewed

Radeon 7500 - Also Released Today

ATi is not only launching its new high-end product Radeon 8500 today, but also a card with the name 'Radeon 7500'.

Radeon 7500 is basically a 'tuned' version of the good old Radeon . The die-shrink to 0.15 micron process technology enabled ATi to run this 'old design' at higher clock speeds. ATi added the HydraVision back-end of the RadeonVE and supposedly also the memory interface of Radeon 8500 (not confirmed).

You can see the 'Charisma Engine' T&L unit and the two pixel rendering pipelines. Radeon 7500 comes with two integrated RAMDACs, so that it doesn't require an external chip to support two CRTs. The memory interface is able to support memory clocks up to 250 MHz. Our test sample was running at 250 MHz core clock and 230 MHz memory clock.

Radeon 7500 is targeted at NVIDIA's future 'GeForce3MX' chip, aka 'NV17'. Right now Radeon 7500 is well able to compete with GeForce2 GTS and GeForce2 Pro cards. Depending on its price it could be a very interesting mid-range solution that easily beats NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX line.