NVIDIA's Fall Product Line: GeForce3 Titanium

The Competition

A little over a month ago we provided you with a preview of ATI's two new graphics cards, the Radeon 7500 and 8500.  Apparently ATI has been hard at work on drivers for the 8500 in particular, attempting to not only match but exceed the performance of the GeForce3.  In spite of our requests to have a final card and final drivers ready for today, ATI wasn't able to get us everything in time.  The final Radeon 8500 with final drivers will be in our hands (according to ATI) sometime this week, and we'll provide you with a final look at that card when we have it.  The performance of our original sample is too poor to report here again, but if you're interested you can go back to our original preview.  If the Radeon 8500 can indeed offer better performance than the GeForce3 then it could be very attractive simply because it will be priced below $300.

The Radeon 7500 is not as impressive unfortunately.  As we mentioned in our original preview, the card needs to be cheaper if it is to compete with the GeForce2 Pro and now the GeForce3 Ti 200.  The only differences between the shipping Radeon 7500 and the one we previewed in August is that it now has a 20MHz higher core clock and has slightly improved drivers.  ATI was not able to provide us with shipping Radeon 7500 drivers in time for this review but we used the 5.13.3249 drivers they provided us with earlier for the 7500 benchmarks.  The major changes in the final revision of the drivers are seemingly bug related and not performance related. 

Competitive Feature Comparison Chart