msrp is $299 ($50 less than gf3 ti500, $100 more than gf3 ti $200)
oem's can be had for around $250 give or take, but is clocked slower. dell had (has?) a special "small business" offer that puts it a little over $200, but for the most part don't expect those cards to ship for another week or two.
review overall have been "this baby has potential".
pros:
great feature set
great value; lotsa performance & feature for $299
cons:
not all features work at this time.
has performed slightly under what everyone has expected (tho still a great performer)
drivers, drivers, drivers.
quotes:
"We would be lying if we didn't mention that the Radeon 8500's "final" performance was a bit disappointing; we weren't expecting parity with the $199 GeForce3 Ti 200, we were expecting a GeForce3 Ti 500 killer. All of the specs pointed at a higher performing product, but in the end we are limited by what has been ATI's Achilles' heel: drivers. Luckily the majority of these driver issues are performance related and not compatibility/quality related, but it still means that if you purchase a Radeon 8500 today you won't be getting all that you're paying for; untapped potential is great if it is eventually going to be exposed." ~anantech
"We are surprised that ATi launched this product at this time. It is obvious that all the features are not operating properly and testing was lackluster at best. We found compatibility problems with the card after only spending ten minutes with it after getting the drivers installed. We would think that if we were putting out a VidCard that we would be embarrassed by such events. You might have seen this card referred to by other hardware sites as having potential. We know that when we buy a piece of hardware, potential is absolutely not what we are looking for. We want to open the box and get our money's worth, and ATi has not done that with the Radeon 8500 in its current state." ~hardocp
"For now, Radeon 8500 is definitely making NVIDIA's life a bit harder, as it attacks the $50 more expensive GeForce3 Ti500 cards. However, as long as NVIDIA's high-end solution is performing better in a large number of benchmarks and as long as GeForce3 Ti500 is the only of the two competitors that comes with a multi-sampling FSAA solution, NVIDIA has no major reasons to worry." ~tomshardware
" In terms of gaming power we were very pleased with the RADEON 8500's numbers, with this one major caveat; in all of our benchmarks, save Quake III and RTCF, the RADEON 8500 crashed at least once. This is indicative of a piece of hardware with poorly written drivers." ~got apex?
"We've seen glimmers of excellence with the Radeon 8500 and 7500 product lines, only to be soiled by a non functional feature like SmoothVision or less than capable performance, as we saw in our OpenGL testing." ~Hot Hardware
"Once again, ATI's claims of the top performing graphics card on the market don't come true. With a faster core, and faster memory, the 8500 somehow managed to underperform the nVidia Ti500 card in every test, and in some cases, the older GeForce3 and slower GeForce3 Titanium 200." ~ gamepc
there are more review, however they all pretty much say the same things, tho some go into more depth than others about the good and bad...
Discussion Zen 5 Speculation (EPYC Turin and Strix Point/Granite Ridge - Ryzen 9000)
Discussion Intel current and future Lakes & Rapids thread
