It has been a long time coming and countless delays since the rumours of ATI's next generation GPU, the R600 were leaked onto the net. Here a brief timeline between the very first rumours and now. Since then ATI has merged with AMD, NVIDIA has released the 8800 GTX, GTS and Ultra, Saddam Hussein has been eliminated, Martin Scorsese has won an Oscar, etc. You get the point. It has been a long and arduous time waiting for some new ATI cards. Expectations are very high for the R600 and kept getting fueled with every specification media leak. But it's here and we've had it in our hands for the past week and it is indeed very exciting. Today we're going to take a hands on look at the R600 and a brief description rest of the "HD 2000" series which is just being announced now.
The R600 or Radeon HD 2900XT will launch on May 14th (today!) however the lower end 2600 and 2400 series will launch concurrently at later date in June. The latter cards are not yet available for sale and no review samples have been made available yet. The HD 2900XT is currently alread listed in several major e-tailers. Something really exciting that you should know is that the 2900XT has been priced very competitively against NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB while having the allure of a more expensive "flagship" product. The HD 2900 XT will be replacing the longstanding X1950 XTX which stood as ATI flapship card for quite some time now. The previous generation for ATI wasn't an overall disaster but comparatively against the 79xx series, it left a lot to be desired and noticeably failed to capture a large marketshare, especially for ATI fans coming of the X800 and 9800 series.
Although this new slew of Radeon releases is being hyped by many media outlets to incite an immediate clash of titans of sort between ATI and NVIDIA, it should be kept in mind that there can't a be definite winner any time in the near future. DirectX 10 should and could play a major role specifically during this release and yet there aren't any DX10 games out as of yet, except for copies of an early test version of Call of Juarez which only certain press have. Also ATI will be launching another card sooner than later which will indefinitely become flagship card for them, so declaring anything as the de facto standard will be unfair until both companies have put out all their cards on the table. The R600 vs. G80 debate will be a long process but at the very least, the new HD 2900XT will finally spark some flames and perhaps prove to be a major competitor.
Below are a few specification sheet which detail the new launch which has some really attractive numbers.
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