The Radeon 8500 line gets refreshed
ATI's answer to the new GeForce4 Ti cards is simple: double the RAM on the Radeon 8500. The Radeon 8500 GPU already has many of the new features NVIDIA added to the GeForce4 Ti, like dual vertex shaders and more advanced pixel shaders with dependent texture addressing. [Ed: No theory, please.]

Sorry about that.

But to combat the GeForce line in stores, ATI added a card to the mix, the Radeon 8500LE 128MB. The Radeon 8500LE is nothing more than a Radeon 8500 with core and memory clock speeds at 250MHz, or 25MHz lower than the Radeon 8500. To cut costs, ATI also removed the DVI-out port on the LE card. Retailing for about $199, the 8500LE promises to give GeForce4 cards some serious competition in the bang-for-your-buck category.

ATI's Radeon 8500LE 128MB

The Radeon 8500LE card has Infineon memory in a square BGA package For now, the original Radeon 8500 remains at the high end of ATI's lineup. Like the LE cards, the 8500 now comes with 128MB. In theory, the extra memory ought to allow for better performance handling complex scenes with lots of texture and geometry data.