no, there is no 3d performance. I had a 8500GT for a few days and even though I had a 100% overclock on it, it still couldn't really play anything...except for Quake 4 @ medium settings
Like I said, the 3850's are much better for 3d performance.
the 8500 GT's only have 16 shaders, at 900MHZ. Compared with the 8800 GTS's 96 at 1200MHZ, and the GT's 112 at 1500MHZ.
the 8800 GT will outperform a 3850, and it will outperform a 3870 by a small margin (single card vs single card)
But the 3850 and 3870 are still high performance cards, have UVD hardware for HD acceleration (which the 8800's lack), and they're relatively cheap (which makes them appealing for crossfire, especially since crossfire scales better than SLI), and don't consume much power.
So basically, the 3850's and 3870's are:
cheap, high performance, low power consumption cards, with full HD video acceleration.