A Radeon 8500 is indeed better than a 9250, because it has the double amount of hardware vertex shaders/TMUs and supports faster RAM.

However, it looks like you can't use the video in/out features without the matching proprietary cable, which is probably very hard to find.

Plus, the description "Abb. ähnlich" hints that the photos may show a similar card, but not necessarily the model you get.
I would ask the seller for more details before buying it.

The 8500 is roughly on par with the Ti4200... I think the Geforce has maybe a 5% advantage over the Radeon.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

The 8500 is roughly on par with the Ti4200... I think the Geforce has maybe a 5% advantage over the Radeon.

And if i recall the Radeon 8500 also outputs superior image quality... compared to alternative cards at the time 😀

No the 8500 has inferior quality, unfortunately.

It doesn't support trilinear and anisotropic together, you must use bilinear with anisostropic. Ick. And on top of that its anisotropic is a cheap knock off that is extremely angle dependent, meaning lots of textures get skipped in a typical scene. The only plus is its AF is very fast, undoubtedly due to the minimized workload it has.

Also, unlike even GF3, it lacks MSAA. The 8500 is too slow for SSAA so basically you can't use its AA for much. 2X SSAA = 50% performance loss.

The greatest tragedy is probably how its shader model 1.4 hardware can't outperform NV's older designs. I remember reading about how with Doom3 id figured the 8500 would pull ahead due to its ability to do more per render pass. But the chip wasn't designed properly and had internal bottlenecks that held it back.

At least the drivers improved dramatically over its time. It started off really bad.

Firegl 8800 is the best of breed of the g200 line, clocked slightly higher for both GPU and memory.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

The 8500 is roughly on par with the Ti4200... I think the Geforce has maybe a 5% advantage over the Radeon.

Not even remotely. GF4 ti4200 was a tamed beast - more often then not, you could overclock it to ti4600 values (or more) and have an awesome card, where the overclocking potential of Radeon 8500 was very, very limited (from default 285/285 to 300/300 Mhz), which offered almost no performance increase at all.

Even GF 3 ti 200 was a better choice then Radeon 8500, let alone GF3 ti 500, with their scrawny pixel shader V1.1. Q: radeons shader V1.4 - where is it used exactly? A: nowhere.

The only advantage of radeon 8500 over GF4 ti was that it was half the price of it. Thats why I used it back at the time - but I regretted doing that.

Yes, the Ti4200 is a better card overall, I'm not arguing that, but... where did I ever say anything about overclocking? Out of the box, the two cards are pretty close.

I think the point being made is out the of the box the 4200 overclocks like mad, which everyone did, which means not pretty close when it came to practice, but the 8500 was designed to compete against the geforce3, with the ti500 being nvidia's response to the 8500, so that it gets outpaced by the geforce4 series isn't a mark against it. This lopsidedness is flipped once the 9700 & then 9800 is introduced, where even nvidia's response with the 5800 & 5900 fail to catch up.

elfuego wrote:

Q: radeons shader V1.4 - where is it used exactly?

Games I know of offhand:
-FarCry. FarCry is actually heavily DX8 based and does use 1.4 shaders.
-Doom3 has a render path specifically for R200-style GPUs.
-HL2 has DX8.1 support among its list of dropback paths and the GeForce FX ran this path.

SM 1.4 t just didn't allow much speed improvement on 8500 (R200) because the chip has some hardware issues. John Carmack commented on this while working on Doom3. PS1.4 is really cool actually. It allows for considerably more complex shader programs. But obviously SM2.0 and higher are much better so end of story.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/89674-33-ca … ck-speaks-r8500

The fragment level processing is clearly way better on the 8500 than on the Nvidia products, including the latest GF4. You have […]
Show full quote

The fragment level processing is clearly way better on the 8500 than on the
Nvidia products, including the latest GF4. You have six individual textures,
but you can access the textures twice, giving up to eleven possible texture
accesses in a single pass, and the dependent texture operation is much more
sensible. This wound up being a perfect fit for Doom, because the standard
path could be implemented with six unique textures, but required one texture
(a normalization cube map) to be accessed twice. The vast majority of Doom
light / surface interaction rendering will be a single pass on the 8500, in
contrast to two or three passes, depending on the number of color components
in a light, for GF3/GF4 (*note GF4 bitching later on).

Unfortunately, as he discovers, the chip has performance problems even though it is superior in many ways to the NV2x.

I think the point being made is out the of the box the 4200 overclocks like mad, which everyone did, which means not pretty close when it came to practice

I see the point being made. However, my point is being completely missed, apparently. I was attempting to give a simple, concise reference as to the speed of the 8500, compared to a card that I know Retro Games 100 has.

I did not say that the 8500 was as fast as a Ti4200 running at nearly Ti4600 speed. If I had meant that, I would've just compared it directly to the Ti4600. I did not say that the 8500 was nearly as fast as a Ti4200 running at Ti4400 speed. If I had meant that, I would've just compared it directly to a Ti4400.

What I said was that the 8500 was nearly as fast as a Ti4200. I guess I was being to presumptuous to assume people would reason that to mean a Ti4200 running at the speed of a Ti4200.

IMO an 8500 and a Ti 4200 perform similarly enough that the differences are only going to be really tangible on a benchmark graph. I also don't see why overclocking needs to be included in the discussion.

Referring to the O.P., I think this card is a Pinnacle Edition PRO 5. There's a review and photo of it here -

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/peripherals/44 … e-edition-pro-5

The card(s) for sale offered on that ebay listing (see O.P.) looks identical to the photo in this review, but it lacks the front panel thing. I did a search for the drivers, and it seems they are only available for 2000/XP. In other words - no Win98.