Did Drivers Save The Radeon 8500?

erek

erek

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"In this video we take a look at the Radeon 8500, ATI's flagship from 2001 that was well known for being an underwhelming graphics card. Over time however driver development saw this card slowly but surely improving. In the end, was it enough to make this card a beast? Let's find out."


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEeT2eM6g4U
 
I think I still have one of these in a box somewhere.
 
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So it looks like Radeon's Fine Wine™ was established long before GCN (IIRC when I first started hearing about it)
 
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GoldenTiger said:
Lol. Did you even read the text in the picture? ATI cheated for their "fine wine" back then, and nowadays it doesn't exist with AMD.
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Lol. Did you even watch the video? The 8500 saw an undeniable uplift in performance with driver updates across the board in synthetic benchmarks and any game tested.

But yes doing what they did at launch, where certain executables got a magic performance boost was sketchy.
 
I bought one initially near launch. The original reason I tried the Ati 8500 was its much better TV-out which was a big deal to me back in the day. Then returned it shortly because of drivers. Swapped it for a GF3-200 which was the same price but with lower RAM. Keep it for a while but it was a little underwhelming as far as performance and TV-out, but it was stable. Then I noticed that improved drivers were being reported so I bought a 8500 again and it was great. Much better then my GF3-200 was performing on my machine.
 
erek said:
it might still, just hasn't been detected yet, right?
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Hasn't been detected is a bit of a misnomer. There have been fairly credible rumors of AMD strong arming developers to not include DLSS in their games and in at least one game engine, strip DLSS as it's already part of the engine (literally a checkbox to implement).

Honestly, people tend to ignore and quickly forget when their company of choice pulls some bullshit. But in all reality, both companies need to stop dicking around and deliver solid performing products and decent prices instead of having a pissing match in regards to their features, because when push comes to shove AMD is just following Nvidia's lead in the features department.
 
I had a Radeon 8500 and used it for quite a while. Never once had a problem with it and it ran everything I needed it to. I didn't replace it until the GeForce 7600GT.

I will say that the Radeon 7500 AIW was actually a faster card in a number of games (a friend of mine had one and he had me check it out) but the rendering looked much more basic and didn't look nearly as good as the 8500.
 
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