The Radeon 7500 is the little brother to the Radeon 8500 and is essentially an enhanced version of the original Radeon card, an example of which was tested in this round-up as a yardstick and included in the performance graphs (pages 50-51). It features the Charisma Engine; ATIs equivalent of the T&L engine found in GeForce-based cards.

Although ATIs Radeon 7500 does not feature the new Charisma Engine II, with technology such as Truform, Smartshader and Hyper Z II, it is still a very competent graphics card targeted at the mid-range 3D graphics market.

It has been a long time coming, but finally there is some serious competition to the mantle assumed by the behemoth that is NVIDIA. The Radeon 8500 is the latest graphics chipset from ATI, which itself is a graphics giant, though does not possess nearly the same public profile in the consumer 3D market. Unlike previous ATI cards that featured exclusively on ATIs own branding and PCB, the Radeon 8500 and 7500 are open to other board manufacturers, presumably to take a bigger bite out of NVIDIAs lucrative market share.

There was once a time when 3dfx ruled the 3D accelerator market, but...

This card is the same card as the Bravura Evil Master II, but without the retail extras thrown in. The card itself is a fairly plain-looking affair - a simple green PCB (printed circuit board) with a small cooling fan and heatsink over the GPU, and an array of RAM modules absent of the large RAM heatsinks now commonplace on the NVIDIA models.

With NVIDIA's new graphics chip still a couple of months away from reaching retail stores, ATI's RADEON 9700 is still the undoubted king when it comes to performance: if you want the fastest card available, then you can't go past the 9700.

You pay for what you get online, or do you? Ron Osborn tells a tale of confusing branding and high expectations.

Breathe some life into your old PC in time for a Vista upgrade with these budget AGP video cards.

A capable card – decent performance without a high price.

Not particulary quick, but a resonably priced media card.

ATI Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 cards unveiled.

Impressive performance at a nice price

An immensely powerful card, tempered by flaky drivers.

The ATI HD 4800s hit a sweet-spot of performance and price. If you're after high-end performance at a few hundred dollars less than the 4870, then this is your card

A cheap card, with the bonus of reasonable gaming ability.

Can’t handle gaming, and beaten by cheaper media cards too.

Something’s wrong with DirectX 10 gaming when even top end cards are struggling with the latest games.

The RADEON 9600 PRO was an interesting chip when it came to the 3DMark2001SE Pro tests. It actually performed better at high resolution than low resolution at default settings.

Although this 8500LE was far from being the most spectacular benchmarker we tested, it offers an excellent performance/ price balance that's impossible to beat.

AMD has launched a media focused chipset designed for mainstream budget Windows 7 PCs..