LOSTCIRCUITS

FIC has been one of the first major companies to start a licensing partnership with ATi. Partnering with 3rd party manufacturers means a major turnaround in the history of ATi who, until recently, manufactured every card themselves. There are a few differences between the original ATI Radeon8500 and the licensed version, the most dramatic change is the use of lower speed bin GPU and memory components with the clock for both set to 250 MHz instead of 275 MHz. Another difference is that the FIC OEM card does not come with any flashy packaging but arrived in a plain white box.

The FIC RADEON 8500 looks just like any other RADEON 8500, featuring the Rage Theater chip for dolby surround digital sound. The heatsinks on the memory chips are not included in the shipping version, they are courtesy of HomeDepot, a hacksaw, vise and sandpaper (blood, sweat, tears and curses not included)

Typical for any OEM card, manual, or software bundles are missing. The only exception were the drivers but as so often, there already had been newer drivers posted on various locations on the web. In terms of layout, the FIC Radeon8500 cards follows the reference design of the original ATI Radeon 8500.

At One Glance

• RADEON 8500 GPU (250 MHz)
• Features ATI's TRUFORM, SMARTSHADER, SMOOTHVISION, and HYPER Z II technologies
• Support for DirectX® 8.1
• Supports OpenGL® 1.3 features
• 64MB DDR memory
• Dual monitor and Video output support
• Industry-leading DVD video playback
• Digital Flat Panel (DVI) support
• S-Video Out
• Supports 3D resolutions (32-bit color) up to 2048x1536
• AGP universal bus (for AGP 2X/4X systems)

Since everyone shows the front of the cards, here is the rearview highlighting the heasinks on the memory chips

Other marketing buzzwords from ATI include:

• TRUFORM
• SMARTSHADER
• DirectX® 8.1 support
• OpenGL® 1.3
• SMOOTHVISION anti-aliasing
• HYPER Z II
• CHARISMA ENGINE II
• PIXEL TAPESTRY II
• VIDEO IMMERSION II
• High Performance Memory Support
• Dual Display Support (HYDRAVISION)
• Integrated Transformation, Clipping and Lighting (Hardware T&L)
• Twin Cache Architecture
• SuperScalar Rendering
• Single-Pass Multi-texturing
• True Color Rendering
• Triangle Setup Engine
• Texture Cache
• Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering
• Line & Edge Anti-aliasing (multisampling)
• Full-Screen Anti-aliasing (supersampling)
• Texture Compositing
• Texture Decompression (Well, that's kind of trivial!)
• Specular Highlights
• Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping
• Mip-Mapping
• Z-buffering and Double-buffering
• Emboss, Dot Product 3 and Environment bump mapping
• Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid and Cubic environment mapping
• Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing

Software Bundle

(n/a)

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