"official" R8500 drivers

[pr497]

ati has just posted official drivers for the R8500 for windows XP and 2k.

many people already d/led the drivers through windows update so this shouldnt be anything special (except for the fact that its on ati's website....not microsoft and that these are not beta/leaked drivers).
the driver version are:

6015 for win xp
6014 for win 2k

<A HREF="http://www.rage3d.com" target="_new">http://www.rage3d.com</A>
<A HREF="http://support.ati.com/products/pc/radeon8500/winxp/radeon8500_winxp_drivers.html?cboOS=Windows+XP&cboProducts=RADEON+8500&cmdNext=GO!" target="_new"> ati support</A>

btw....notice how i didnt use the word "new".

<A HREF="http://gamershq.madonion.com/compare2k1.shtml?2649487" target="_new">P4 NW + DDR</A> = <font color=blue>Not Bad</font color=blue>

 

[prepsmdker]

Well, these drivers are a lot more stable than the beta drivers they have now. The only difference I notice is that the Nature demo in 3Dmark2001 is slower, the advance pixel shader actually runs, and antistropic filtering is not available to be turned on for direct 3D with the driver.

Don't forget, ATI has to send the Drivers to Microsoft simply to get them approved, and then they could send them back to ATI(who probably does their own testing again, though I'm unsure about that). So in the end, Microsoft would have the drivers available first.

 

[rcf84]

They worked pretty good. i can wait for the next beta's.

I Love playing on my GameCube or PC cuz there both ATi powered...

 

[prepsmdker]

I tested the new drivers with the new 3Dmark.

At least in my case, my benchmark was around 200 points lower than the beta drivers available, but because the 8015 drivers aren't optimized for the effects used in the Nature demo.
So with the new drivers, you could expect a drop off of 10-20 fps in the nature demo(which adds up to 200+ benchmarks off).

Overall, the drivers work, unlike the beta drivers which didn't allow the advance pixel shader to be used.