German computer site Chip.de has posted some benchmarks of the Radeon 8500, putting it against the GeForce 3 Ti/500, the regular GeForce 3 and the Radeon 7500. They run all the cards in Quake3 , 3D Mark 2001 and 3D Mark 2000. It looks like the ATI Radeon 8500 actually managed to beat the GeForce 3 Ti/500 in 3D Mark 2001, while slightly trailing that card in Quake 3.

	Quake 3 demo 001 640x480	Quake 3 demo 001 1024x768	Quake 3 demo 001 1600x1200	3D Mark 2001 640x480	3D Mark 2001 1024x768
ATI Radeon 8500	158fps	148fps	101fps	8573	7426
GeForce 3 Ti/500	159fps	150fps	106fps	7578	6820
GeForce 3	159fps	146fps	95fps	7200	6391

The autocracy of Nvidia is scratched with ATIs Radeon 8500. For the first time for a long time ATI, " eternal second " succeeds in enthronen its largest competitors. Even particularly on DirectX 8,0 optimized Spielbenches, like Aquamark or 3DMark 2001, run faster than on Nvidias pixel acrobat.