Unitech Optimus 8500 eXP

The Unitech Optimus 8500 eXP
A RADEON 8500 tweaked out for the masses

By -Chris Angelini
May 29th, 2002

Croteam's Serious Sam, The Second Encounter is an OpenGL or DirectX based game title with many leading edge graphics effects and high resolution textures.  We ran our tests in OpenGL mode.

Serious Sam: The Second Encounter Raising the bar with more intense testing and better visuals

Serious Sam SE is able to cast the Optimus 8500 in a much more positive light, as the card outperforms the GeForce4 using the latest drivers from ATI.  Overclocking yields 10 percent more performance than the stock clock settings, further distancing the Unitech board from NVIDIA?s Ti 4400 design.

Comanche 4 - DirectX 8.1 Performance What next generation game engines should look like

Flight simulators are generally limited by CPU performance, but high resolution tests are still able to expose differences between video cards, especially when the test features full DirectX 8 shader support.  The tables turn once again in the Comanche 4 benchmarking demo as both boards with NVIDIA processors beat the RADEON-equipped Optimus card.  In a situation like this, it is a fairly safe guess that either Novalogic optimized the game for NVIDIA?s architecture or NVIDIA?s drivers are more heavily optimized for the game than ATI?s.

3DMark 2001SE, More Anti-Aliasing, Overclocking and The Rating