ATI's Radeon 8500 & 7500: A Preview

UnrealTournament

Although not as good of a benchmark as Quake III Arena, UnrealTournament has been with us for almost the same amount of time.  This first person shooter uses the Direct3D API.  We used Reverend's Thunder demo with all of the settings set to the max at 1024 x 768 x 32.

UnrealTournament doesn't take advantage of the GeForce3's memory bandwidth until much higher resolutions, which explains the performance parity with the GeForce2 Pro. 

The Kyro II does extremely well under UnrealTournament; the only explanation we can find is that there is a lot of overdraw in UT allowing the Kyro II to truly excel.  If this is the case, then there's no reason that the Radeon 8500 should be doing this poorly except for drivers.