ATI's Radeon 8500 - New drivers expose potential

Final Words

The question of "when?" should be on every single Radeon 8500 owners' mind. According to ATI these drivers will be made available as beta drivers on the date of publication (11/14/2001). The drivers are definitely a welcome present to Radeon 8500 owners and will not be made available to Radeon 7500 owners at this time simply because there was such a great rush to get these out that there wasn't enough time to tailor a similar driver set to the 7500.

The inclusion of SMOOTHVISION proves that the technology is superior to anything else we've seen out there on both a performance quality level. Unfortunately the drivers aren't flawless and there still are random bugs. While ATI has done their best to list any incompatible games or other scenarios in the driver release notes, they can't change the reality of not being able to test on every person's system. The drivers are still not up to par with NVIDIA's Detonator series from a stability standpoint but it's good to see ATI actively addressing their problems.

According to ATI we should begin to see a regular flow of beta drivers from ATI on a much more frequent basis (possibly every few weeks?).

In our original review of the card we said that the Radeon 8500 had potential, and we finally saw an example of just that.