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

Here is part of Chip.de's conclusion, Babelfished from German to English.

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.