ATI card hierarchy

  • Thread starter Thread starter sachaburnett
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sachaburnett

Hi!

Forgive my ignorance! Can someone please tell me what the card
hierarchy for ATI's line of video cards is? I see a lot of graphics s/w
and games saying that it require a minimum of an ATI Radeon 8500.

I have an ATI Radeon X300SE. Is that higher than a ATI Radeon 8500?

THX!!

SB
 
No. The X300SE is in fact significantly slower. There's no corresponding
PCIe card to the 8500. The next higher up is a X600 Pro, which is quite a
bit faster than the 8500.
 
No. The X300SE is in fact significantly slower. There's no corresponding
PCIe card to the 8500. The next higher up is a X600 Pro, which is quite a
bit faster than the 8500.
Click to expand...

The X300SE is the more modernarchitecture though. The 8500 is way ancient by
now. There has been the whole 9x00 generation in between and now it's the
Xx00 series.
 
Dirk said:
The X300SE is the more modernarchitecture though. The 8500 is way ancient by
now. There has been the whole 9x00 generation in between and now it's the
Xx00 series.
Click to expand...
Don't forget the X1x00 series too. I'm a happy X300 SE owner, not being
a heavy gamer. :D
 
Thanks guys!

Will I be able to run games with a minimum requirement of ATI Radeon
8500 with my ATI Radeon X300SE (128MB)?

Thx

SB
 
The games will run, because X300SE supports all the features of the Radeon
8500. Whether they will run at an acceptable speed, though, will obviously
depend on the game and how much eyecandy you enable in the game's options.
 
The 9100 was a slower clocked 8500, the 9000 and 9200 were inferior to the
8500. The 9500 was better, went up from there. If I remember correctly the
technology doesn't change much right up to the x1 lines. I went
8500-9800-x800gto2 and the only thing I saw go up was speed, don't recall
any new features.

Mike
 
The 8500 was a DX8.1 card, so it doesn't support some DX9 features. One such
feature is the heat shimmer effect from flames, steam and rocket blasts in
Doom 3 and Quake 4. The 8500 was also stuck with an inefficient
fixed-pattern supersampling AA mode.

In fact, the feature enhancements going from the 8500 to the 9500 are
probably more profound than going from the 9_00 to the X1_00.

Of course, on anything slower than the 9500 Pro, the DX9 effects incur too
much of a performance penalty to be usable.
 
Forgot about the dx9, thanks for correcting me, enough misinformation out
here as it is... :-)
Never mentioned my first ATI since the rage2 was the original RadeonLE
before the 8500, got nice performance jump with each upgrade.

Mike
 
Mike said:
The 9100 was a slower clocked 8500, the 9000 and 9200 were inferior to the
8500. The 9500 was better, went up from there. If I remember correctly the
technology doesn't change much right up to the x1 lines. I went
8500-9800-x800gto2 and the only thing I saw go up was speed, don't recall
any new features.
Click to expand...

The 9500 had the same 275MHz core and memory speed and four pipelines as
the 8500, but the 9200 Pro had slightly higher clocks, 300Mhz, so was
the first card on the list to eclipse the 8500 on specs, if so slightly.
The 9000 Pro had the same basic specs as the 8500 - 275Mhz core and DDR
memory, 128-bit interface, four pipelines (but only one texture unit per
pipe like all the 9000 series cards; the 8500 had two), and the 9200
cards were basically just AGP 8X versions of the same card; the 9000 and
9200 were DX8 cards. The 9500 Pro had eight pipes, the same as the 9700
and 9800, so was much faster than the 8500, and was a DX9 piece. The
difference between the 9500 Pro and those others was the memory
interface, 128-bit on the 9500 and all those lesser cards and 256-bit on
the 9700 and 9800. And I think the 9100 was exactly the same as an 8500
LE, which had speeds of 250MHz.

The X300SE is pretty anemic, a 325MHz core saddled with 200MHz DDR
memory and a 64-bit interface. The regular X300 has a 128-bit interface
but the same clocks.
 
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