Radeon 8500 in 16 bit?

[Frobisher]

Hi!

I'm thinking of upgrading my computer soon and am considering the ATI Radeon 8500. I know that previous generations of ATI cards including the original Radeon had lousy 16 bit quality when playing games. I usually get most of my games from the "cheap" bin and still enjoy some the older games such as "Jedi Knight" and the "Tomb Raider" series.

Has the 16 bit quality improved? Or should I stay away from the Radeon 8500 when it comes to older games.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Rifter]

I would go with a Geforce 3 Ti 200, it's cheaper than a 8500, can overclock to near Ti 500 speeds if not hit 500 speeds, and would be much better for older games beacuse you can use the 4X AA which is much more useable than ATI's AA, plus the 16bit is better, this seems like a no brainer to me.

 

[rbV5]

Actually I believe the 8500 beats the GF3 in 16bit, a complete reversal from the previous generation, but honestly, are there really any 16 bit games that will stress either card?

 

[AA0]

all cards ignore 16bit now too, including nvidia... its out of date and there is a minimal performance hit.

 

[Rand]

<< all cards ignore 16bit now too, including nvidia... its out of date and there is a minimal performance hit. >>



I disagree, under some conditions you can still gain a very respectable performance boost from dropping to 16bpp rather then 32bpp even on the Radeon8500/GeForce3 level cards.

From what I've seen the R8500 improves 16bit tremendously over the rather poor 16bpp of the original Radeon core, so I'd tend to prefer it as it's the faster gaming card with a much larger feature set.

In games as old as Tomb Raider, and Jedi Knight you should be able to pull of 4X FSAA with anisotropic filtering with relative ease.

 

[BFG10K]

Unless the game specifically forces a certain colour level the drivers will force games to use whatever colour depth your desktop is set to. So the vast majority of old games will run under 32 bit colour if you set you desktop to 32 bit colour as well.

 

[Rand]

<< Unless the game specifically forces a certain colour level the drivers will force games to use whatever colour depth your desktop is set to. So the vast majority of old games will run under 32 bit colour if you set you desktop to 32 bit colour as well. >>



While that's true you also have to keep in mind that in many older games the source material is 16bpp in nature, which severely limits any visible benefit to viewing it in 32bit color.