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.

Bravura is a local brand with its origins at Australia IT, maker of strong PCs baring that moniker. The Bravura Evil Master Radeon II 8500 is basically new branding on a stock ATI PCB board, packaged with a couple of software titles Rune and PowerDVD.

Technically, the Radeon 8500 is on par with, if not superior to, the GeForce3 line. It has a richer image, with features such as Hyper Z, which intelligently deals with the problem of overdraw, and Trueform, which provides smoother curved surfaces by executing polygon trickery on the fly. It is a very fast card, having posted strong benchmarks, and is competitively priced against GeForce3-based cards.