One of the first graphics cards in full support for DX 8.1 in 2002: Radeon 8500
If DX 7.0 is the era when ATI has been catching up with NVIDIA, then DX 8.1 is the era of ATI's excitement, when ATI released the first graphics card that fully supports all the features of DX 8.1: Radeon 8500.
The Radeon 8500 uses a 0.15 micron manufacturing process with a core/memory frequency of 275MHz/550MHz and DDR memory for a memory bandwidth of up to 12GB/s! The new generation of Smartshader engine, coupled with the support of many advanced technologies such as Charisma Engine II, Pixel Tapestry II, Turform, and Smoothvision, made the Radeon 8500 the most powerful product of its time. Unfortunately, although the hardware is powerful, ATI's driver can't squeeze out the maximum performance of the Radeon 8500, so that it can't completely defeat the GeForce 3.
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