HALF A YEAR AND MANY DRIVERS LATER.... 8500 vs ti500

[Alex]

Sorry this is prolly a dumb thread for most ppl but its VERY important to me!

Ok well a lot has changed... nvidias WinXP drivers are up to 27.10 and ati's leaked ones are @ 6018 if im not mistaken...

ok so anyone care to illuminate me about whether the geforce still kicks radeons ass in winxp?
with NO overclocks plz...

 

[moocat]

Well...I'm not sure by what margin the ti500 beats the 8500 in XP but I do know that Nvidia's drivers are considerably more mature than ATIs. Can you post a link to a head to head comparison with both cards using the latest drivers, "leaked" or otherwise?

 

[AA0]

nvidia's are more mature? maybe... but at least a hole bunch of WinXP users with ATI cards don't suffer for the infinite loop problems.

From what I hear the performance gap is very close between the two, with the edge still to the Ti500. Its not enough to warrant the loss of the 8500s feature, in my opinion. I'd like to see benchmarks of a game with truform enabled.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

well there are no problems with my 64DDR in xp.... andn they now have the same drivers for all radeon cards(like nvidia have) so there are no driver problems... also the 8500 was not much slower than the ti500, it must be faster by now.

 

[Daovonnaex]

Provided that you're not a fan of 4x FSAA, the 8500 is generally superior (although the Ti500 gets a few fps ahead in some games), mainly due to feature set, 2D, and image quality. However, I still prefer the GF3 Ti500 for gaming due to the fact that its 4x FSAA is usable.

 

[moocat]

I am a little disappointed with the FSAA performance of the 8500, but I hold some hope that future drivers will improve it. In the mean time 1600x1200 is the next best thing.

Come to think of it...I haven't tried FSAA since I updated to the 9012 drivers a few days ago. I'm a dork and I may have spoken too soon regarding AA performance.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< I am a little disappointed with the FSAA performance of the 8500, but I hold some hope that future drivers will improve it. In the mean time 1600x1200 is the next best thing.

Come to think of it...I haven't tried FSAA since I updated to the 9012 drivers a few days ago. I'm a dork and I may have spoken too soon regarding AA performance. >>

Let me know how 4x FSAA works, since I'm running a GF3 Ti500. I know that 2x FSAA is godly on the 8500, though.

 

[BD231]

I really dont see why anyone would chose a Ti500 over an 8500, the performance gap is so small that there is really no point in spending the extra cash on the Ti500. The visual quality of the Radeon is so much better, I had a GF3 and downgraded to a ATI 64mb DDR VIVO and the quality in color and crispness is just unbilieveable.

 

[moocat]

Daovonnaex, what drivers are you using and what resolution are you using the 2x fsaa in? OpenGL or D2D primarily?

 

[butcom]

With the performance difference within 10FPS in most games, and improving, why not Radeon? I had GF3 Ti500, but then I found the Radeon 8500 for alot cheaper and got that instead. I dont see any difference in the games I play, and I saved lots of money. ATI's drivers are improving, if slowly at the moment, and some of the Radeon features are pretty cool. Also, future games show promise for the Radeon, such as Doom III(John Carmack himself said that Radeon8500 might run it better than GF3), and Unreal II, etc..

But what do I know.....

 

[Rand]

I'd go with the R8500.
It's only slightly slower then the Ti500 now, and ATi has been making considerable strides with their drivers lately. Most people have been able to o/c the 8500 quite nicely too, if your into overclocking. The Unreal 2 benchmarks showed it may well turn out to be faster then the Ti500 in future games.
Plus you get DVI, TV-Out, HydraVision by default. Along with better 2D, a slightly better feature set, and better FSAA.

Not to mention it's a hell of a lot chaper then the Ti500.

Only downside is nVidia has better driver support, but nVidia's been slacking off in that respect lately while ATi has been improving.

 

[moocat]

I take back the FSAA comment...I just fired up the Nascar 2002 demo (very taxing on cpu and 3d) and ran 1600x1200x16 w/Anistropic (whatever aniso settings it defaults to) and 2x FSAA. I didn't have every graphic setting maxxed since some take steal framerate without much image improvement. It was very smooth even in heavy traffic w/smoke hanging in the air. Though it would drop to 30fps it never looked at all 'choppy'. This is a big improvement over the official beta drivers I was using (now using 9012s in Win98).

If there is any significant performance improvements with upcoming drivers this card is going to end up being a steal at what I paid for it.

 

[spanky]

i want an 8500...but i'll have to live with my 7200 til i have mo' money. anyway...the 7200 does pretty good in CS

 

[DarkKnight]

How good exactly is the visual quality of the Radeon? Is it better than the Voodoo 5 (it was the best looking card i ever had)? Another question i have is whether the image quality of nvidia cards improved from the TNT2 to the Geforce 2?,I'm asking thsi because i am upgrading to a GF2 ($51 at newegg, can't beat that ) and I really didn't like the TNT2 image quality.

 

[BeauJangles]

IF you look at Anand's video card roundup the 8500 beat the Ti-500 by a good amount on most resolutions (running latest build of the UNreal engine), but lost out by 1 fps on the highest res tested.

 

[AA0]

The TNT2s IQ wasn't good, but its better then the GF2 MXs, and on par with the normal GF2s I'd say.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< Daovonnaex, what drivers are you using and what resolution are you using the 2x fsaa in? OpenGL or D2D primarily? >>

I'm running 23.11 (remember, I have a GF3 Ti500, not a Radeon 8500). Most of what I do is in 1280 x 1024 at 4x FSAA with anisotropic filtering. If I can't run it at that res, I lower to 1024 x 768. If that doesn't work, I use Quincunx FSAA instead of 4x FSAA. If that doesn't work, I ditch anisotropic filtering. If that doesn't work, I ditch FSAA. Of course, the only game where I can't use FSAA at 1024 x 768 is Aquanox...which isn't that good. My games are a mix of OpenGL and D3D, plus some Glide...

 

[moocat]

My point of reference for image quality and speed has been Nascar 4 (and now N2k2 demo). Based on those games there is no comparison. The 8500 smacks the crap out of the V5 and leaves it for dead. Of course it's completely unfair to compare the two cards since they are from completely different generations but since you asked...

I never had a chance to run the Nascar2k2 demo on my V5 before it was pulled but I can imagine it might have really choked on the larger 512x512 textures.

 

[Alex]

sweet!! thx for all the help y'all!!

i think im goin for 8500 then