whats the real difference between radeon 7000, 7200, 7500, and 8500?

[tokamak]

looks to me like each comes in all sorts of ram configurations. i'm assuming they have different cores or something?

 

[eplebnista]

Here is a link to an excellent article(scroll down for the comparison chart).

hth,
eplebnista

 

[tokamak]

thank you very much. quite helpful

 

[Peter]

'xcept that the 7200 _chip_ does support DDR RAM, and all the 7x00 _chips_ do support Hydravision as well.
It's only ATi themselves don't make cards that use these features.

3rd party card makers do. Got a PowerColor 7200 "Multi-Display Edition" at home, with 64 MBytes of DDR RAM
and DVI, VGA, and TV outputs. (For those who care, clock is 166 MHz.)

regards, Peter

 

[rbV5]

That article is incorrect and misleading in a couple areas like Peter pointed out (old article). I do believe that all the ATI built 7.xxx cards do support hydravision also (my AIW 7500 does), and the memory configurations can vary widely from that chart (even the Rage 6C has retail 198mhz 5ns memory on the later 64DDR models) Some of the third party 7500's also have SDR ram, and Powercolor has a DDR 7200 board as Peter stated.

Just remember that the numbering scheme relates to the GPU only, and relates to relative performance of each. Models within a specific GPU will vary widely in performance based on the memory included on the board, and perhaps by the bios shipped.
The difference between the 7.xxx and 8.xxx is the hardware DX API support. 7.xxx cards support full DirectX 7 features in hardware, 8.xxx cards support full DX 8(8.1) features in hardware, AND the Rage Theater chip has been intergrated into the core on the 7.xxx cards while the 8.xxx cards feature the seperate Rage Theater chip like the original Rage6C radeon cards. 8.xxx AIW cards feature a new tuner on a chip, and the 7.xxx AIW cards have the same phillips analog tuner as the original AIW radeon cards.

 

[spanky]

basically... u want the 8500 becuz it mops the floor with the others and whatever u do, stay away from the 7000 (unless u r looking super budget and need and ati card).