Quake 3
(Q3A, high geometry, high texture detail, trilinear, lightmapping)
Catalyst driver Version 2.2
The Gigabyte Maya shows marginal increase in fps for 1024x768 and 1280x1024 over the ATi reference.
Comanche 4
Both Radeon 8500's with 128Mb of RAM performed about the same. It is interesting to note however, that the any of the nVidia Ti series, regardless of RAM, produces fps of 41 while any ATi GPU, again regardless of RAM, produces roughly 35.7 fps.
Conclusions
On the eve of the release of the Radeon 9700, one would think the recent show of Radeon 8500's would be a moot point. Nonetheless, Gigabyte designed a great board and the Maya Radeon 8500 provides consumers with alternatives to standard green PCB ATi boards. The Gigabyte Maya AP Radeon 8500 isn't quite able to catch up to the nVidia Ti series, and in fact has a little trouble staying on par with ATi's own Radeon 8500. But the box-load of goodies surely makes up any downfalls the card itself has.
Pros:
ATi built on features
Red PCB
Gigabyte V-Tuner overclocking utility
Loads of inbox stuff (Games, PowerDVD, etc
)
Cons:
Not much better than ATi's Radeon 8500
Overall Score: 84%
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