ATi's new Radeon 8500 is the toughest attack against NVIDIA since the days of Voodoo5. This time ATi went almost the whole way to make sure it beats NVIDIA's flagship GeForce3. Still NVIDIA was prepared. This preview will tell you if the Canadian chip and board maker was able to prevail.
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Normal people with sensible interests and serious problems would be petrified by the pure feature-list of ATi's upcoming 3D chip. It's so much stuff that I didn't even contemplate explaining it all here in this article. Luckily ATi has released a lot of technology info about Radeon 8500 in the last weeks and months already, so that those of you, who really need to know all about those features with their funky names, can find a wealth of information all over the web, including right here. All the ones of you blessed with a minimal amount of common sense should be satisfied with this short summary of Radeon 8500's features: 'It's a beefed up GeForce3 and then some'. OK?
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First there was Matrox and its 'DualHead', then came NVIDIA with 'Twinview' and finally ATi launched its own two-display-solution called 'HydraVision'. While Matrox is equipping all of its cards with this practical feature, NVIDIA has so far only equipped its 'value' GeForce2MX-line of cards with a second display outputs (of questionable quality). Radeon 8500 will be the first high end 3D-card with two monitor outputs. It allows every kind of mixture between CRT, digital flat panel and TV, as long as they are only two. Each of the two displays can be driven with its own resolution and refresh rate. Once again I'd like to express my disappointment about the fact that the current test samples do not support this feature as well yet.
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