New RADEONs unveiled

For some time now a silent war has been raging between NVIDIA and ATI. On the one side you have the GeForce 3, NVIDIA at the peak of its game, pushing more polygons per second than any other card on the market twice over, and squaring off against it you have the Radeon DDR, a card that can barely compete on performance but won us over with its 2D and 3D visual quality. NVIDIA GeForce 3 owners have definitely had the run of things for a while though. A lot of people chose to ignore the barely distinguishable difference in visual quality and opt for the card that gave them the most frames and smoothing techniques. They would probably tell you that 2x Quincunx FSAA beats the pants off a pleasant-looking desktop image. Whether they like it or not though, from today they may have to accept a bit of ignominy, because ATI has finally announced its new line of graphics cards and they seem to boast GeForce 3-beating performance without a loss in visual quality. In fact, if anything the new techniques ATI has employed could well improve upon it. From the top, the lineup is RADEON 8500, RADEON 7500 and FIRE GL 8800. The FIRE GL card is a workstation job for mid-range 3D design (CAD/CAM/digital content etc) and as such it doesn't really concern us. The RADEON 7500 though is described as a low price-point, high performance mainstream card with dual monitor, DVI and TV out, 64Mb of DDR memory and RADEON-beating performance according to 3D Winbench. The clever part of the marketing strategy is to depict it as a performance card that fits the budget of a mainstream buyer. By which they mean 'not the sort of guy who bought a GeForce 3'. Competing with NVIDIA for the big numbers though will be the RADEON 8500, which they claim turns up better 3D Mark 2001 figures than the GeForce 3, which has to be a compelling argument given that most of the opportunities gamers have had to really push the GeForce 3 so far have been in this benchmarking program. It doesn't stop there either; 64Mb of DDR memory is onboard, as is DVI output support, dual monitor and video output, the customary DVD decoding facilities that made previous RADEONs so impressive, and to top it all ATI claim that the RADEON 8500 will be the first fully DirectX 8.1 compliant card. We can just see NVIDIA rushing to 'leak' a set of DX 8.1 compliant drivers! We've spoken before about TRUFORM and SMARTSHADER, (you can learn about the former here), but like most new graphics technologies the short and sweet of it is that things look more believable. Things are smoother for a start, blending away those embarrassing straight edges and turning them into luscious curves, and the good news is that unlike some of the more exciting high-end technologies found in the NVIDIA line of cards, ATI's TRUFORM and SMARTSHADER can be applied to current games on the fly, making them a valuable addition to the RADEON line. Apparently ATI share our convictions that gamers want their performance increases and nicer visuals now, not six months away when the games arrive. ATI may finally have broken away from the shackles of their Rage Pro past with the new RADEONs. We'll want to see one before we cast judgement over them, but if the performance figures are to be believed, things could get very hot in the graphics card industry this year. NVIDIA will almost certainly strike back, perhaps with a GeForce 3 Ultra before the end of the year. Oh, and one final thing. This writer would love to hear John Carmack's verdict on how many frames of DOOM 3 the RADEON 8500 can push per second before he buys one. Related Feature - The Truform™ is out there

Source - press release