Radeon 8500 in action
With that out of the way, I'd like to give you a look at what the Radeon 8500, with its fancy pixel shaders, can do. The following screenshots are from an ATI demo. They were all generated in real time, and the demo runs at nice, smooth frame rates—even at 1280x1024 resolution.

The bubble models deform and flex courtesy of the vertex shader, while
pixel shader effects make the bubbles reflect and refract light

This character casts a realistic shadow that falls properly over an uneven surface

Bump mapping lends realism to this scene

All in all, as you can probably tell by looking, the Radeon 8500 is a worthy competitor to the GeForce3.