8500 or 9000 Pro??

[The_King]

Okay, this question has probably been asked before but...

A Hercules 8500 128MB (275/275)

or 9000 Pro 128MB

Which one is faster and which one has best features??

Cheers.

[bsdgeek]

Feature set is the same really, the 9000Pro is a cost reduced version of the 8500, and the 8500 will be faster.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

is the 9000 PRO BBA?

[Marshmallowman]

if they both run at 275/275 the 8500 would usualy be faster, not always.

However:
9000 has better dual display support, (for win2k mainly)but does not like coexisting with other video cards...
9000 does fullstream in hardware, so should give better video playback...it is only just starting to be use now (see divx player), the 8500/9100 will probaly do fullstream in software.

If you get a good 9000 pro with good memory it will OC a lot more 9000's can get up to 350 mhz whereas 8500's are lucky to get 320 or so

And I get them impression that perhaps the 9000 may also have less slow down/and stuttering problems than the 8500...

if they are both clocked the same I would tend to go for a 8500 if they were priced the same, but 9000's are usualy cheaper.

Their sweet spots

winxp and multi video cards go 8500

win2k with one video card go for 9000 pro

[Indiana]

Dual Monitoring: Yes, the R900 has better dual monitor capabilities, since it features the RV250 GPU with it's two internal 400MHz RAMDACs.
The R200 GPU found in the R8500 cards only contains one RAMDAC (350/400MHz), only some cards feature a second external RAMDAC on the board with low 230MHz. Independent resolutions in Win2k are not possible with the R8500, but with the 9000.


Speed: the R8500 will be faster.


Fullstream: Apparently Fullstream will never really be used. What will be used (and actually IS by now with the new DivX Player and the leaked DELL drivers) is hardware acceleration via the DX9 Pixelshaders. (the DivXPlayer only talks about "Use accelerated post-processing for supported ATI Radeon hardware", the term Fullstream is not used )
Now, the R9000 has no DX9 PixelShaders and thus the DivX hardware acceleration does NOT work on these cards, only on R300, R350 and most likely also on RV350 based ATI gfx-cards - that means everything >9500


Personally I wouldn't get any of those two, but take a 9500.