ATI has announced the Radeon 8500LE. The card has 128MB of DDR memory and will be priced at $199. It will also bring full hardware DirectX 8.1 support. ATI also announced that they will also release a 128MB version of the original Radeon 8500 card. Both cards can be expected on the shelves in March.

Like other Radeon cards, the 8500LE will support dual displays. It will also support TRUFORM, SMOOTHVISION, SMARTSHADERS, Vertex Shaders, and Pixel Shaders. One of the main differences between the 8500LE 128MB and 8500 128MB is no DVI connector on the LE.

Among other specs, the card will be AGP 4x ready and will have a DAC frequency of 400MHz.

What do I think? I think it was very smart for ATI to announce this card and price it for $200. Like they said in their own press release:



I think that is generally true, but it really all depends on how the card will perform, especially when compared to a comparable priced GeForce4 when it arrives. Once we see the numbers then we can really make a final decision. Look for the benchmarks on SL soon.

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ActiveTuning - Partner & Director Of Sales & Marketing

I like the price, I like the RAMDAC speed (now if only I had a monitor that could make use of that ), and I like having 128mb of ram on it. I'm still weary of their drivers....which admitedly has gotten better, but is still not up to par with other companies *cough* nvidia *cough*. If I had the money that might be my next card

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos

That looks awesome, and if it does perform good, at least comparable to the GeForce 4 (Im not expecting it to tie, or beat it), then it would definetly be a considerable purchase.

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--Daniel--

The battle between these latest products from ATI and NVIDIA's GeForce4 should be fantastic, although I think that I'm going to skip this video card generation. Had the Rage 128 and Matrox G400 (TNT generation), skipped TNT2 generation, had GeForce 256, skipped GeForce2, have GeForce3... GeForce5 in my future?

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Aaron Dahlen - Gaming Editor
aaron@slcentral.com
SLCentral - Your logical choice for computing and technology
http://www.slcentral.com

Athlon XP 1800+ ... K7V DRAGON Plus ... 256 MB PC2100 ... GeForce3 PowerPack !!! ... Sound Blaster Audigy ... IBM 60GXP 40 GB ... Samsung SyncMaster 950p ... Windows XP Home

Well, I can trace my progession as follows:

Trident SVGA 512kb (dunno which chipset)
ATI RageII+ (died)
S3 ViRGEdx + V2
ATI Radeon 32mb DDR. I got this about 9 months ago....let me just say that I always tend to lag behind what's "current" ;-)

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos

My S3 ViRGE was about *counts on fingers* five 3D chipsets ago. I admire your use of legacy products

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Aaron Dahlen - Gaming Editor
aaron@slcentral.com
SLCentral - Your logical choice for computing and technology
http://www.slcentral.com

Athlon XP 1800+ ... K7V DRAGON Plus ... 256 MB PC2100 ... GeForce3 PowerPack !!! ... Sound Blaster Audigy ... IBM 60GXP 40 GB ... Samsung SyncMaster 950p ... Windows XP Home

Yeah, I was using that ViRGE until june of last year...yikes.

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos

And it goes weeeeeeeee!

My progression:
S3 virge GX 4MB
Intel i740 8MB (till about half a month ago)
Geforce2 MX 400 32MB current.
Next: whatever is costing around $50 in a year from now. Maybe a ATI Radeon 8500LE

weeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

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Road Runner!!!!

Tomorrow's the big day. I hope we get more than just an announcement. Hopefully the big sites have been equipped with GeForce4 cards for some time and are just waiting for the NDA to run out.

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Aaron Dahlen - Gaming Editor
aaron@slcentral.com
SLCentral - Your logical choice for computing and technology
http://www.slcentral.com

Athlon XP 1800+ ... K7V DRAGON Plus ... 256 MB PC2100 ... GeForce3 PowerPack !!! ... Sound Blaster Audigy ... IBM 60GXP 40 GB ... Samsung SyncMaster 950p ... Windows XP Home

ATI has really pulled up it's socks after the not so brilliant sales of it's original Radeon and repated onslaght of new and better performing cards from Nvidia.The current Radeon 8500 kicks Geforce3 butt in terms of features and almost beats it out of contention in games.The 128 MB cards are a welcome arrival which should tide us over till the launch of the R300 based cards.Can't wait for that.

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Feel the Force

And the Radeon cards also have been known to have drivers that are tuned towards a specific game (not important in and of itself), but did so at expense of quality. Their drivers STILL aren't up to par.

EDIT:

dont get me wrong, I own an ATI Radeon 32mb DDR, and an ATI TV Wonder VE....so it's not like I'm a) not speaking from experience, and b) being so critical of them that I won't buy their products :-P

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paul@pleaseohpleasedontspamme.slcentral.com
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems -- P. Erdos