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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.
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.
next: New Architecture Features »
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The bad:
The good
Final value analysis for me goes like this:
The 8800 GTS 640MB card is as much as $80-100 cheaper than the HD 2900 XT, but it doesn't come with a game bundle ($more than a $50 value right there) and doesn't have HDMI with audio support. It doesn't even have HDMI support
If you don't care about HDMI (I don't have a use for it) and you won't play the games (I only want one out of the 4 titles they give you ) then the 8800 GTS is looking pretty good. Otherwise the HD 2900 XT becomes a fairly good choice. I think I'd rather save the $100 at this point though
This message was edited by Redemption on May 14 2007.
1) The 512 bit memory bus is VERY significant; I really expect future drivers to get noticeably more performance out of the card
2) Some of the benchmark results look wonky, suggesting that there is a lot of work to be done on the drivers
3) Some benchmarks gave VERY good results
4) It will be really interesting to see DX10 results
All in all, I really like the performance of the 8800GTS and the potential of the 2900XT - more performance for more reasonable $$$ than the 'ultra' and xtx cards :-)
This message was edited by Tweaker on May 14 2007.
My thinking is that ATI/AMD would never just release the HD 2900 XT with 65nm process. They really have no need. If they can get it to the 65nm process you would start seeing the HD 2900 XTX, HD 2950 XT, and HD 2950 XTX or whatever they decide to name the remainder of the high end price points because they would use the additional headroom and temperature/power savings to crank the clockspeeds.
Btw I forgot to add that HDMI with Audio is a great boost for gamers using their TV's as the gaming display too. I think this is ultimately a very good thing for that particular type of gamer. A 52" LCD with 1 to 1 pixel mapping would make for a pretty sweet game setup - whoever said convergence would lead to nothing?
A die shrink should help the power problem, which is what the R650 is...
While the GTS is 100 bucks cheaper now, i can see it becoming way cheaper... just remember that the current GTS, GTX and Ultra prices are those of release time with no opponent, now that ATi/AMD have finally released there R600, i can see nVidia lowering the price ready to start the battle...
It's pretty obvious, but you can't overstate it. Just look at the 3dmark scores. How can the pixel fill rate just barely be more than x1950? wtf is that about?
I've also been hearing disappointing news about AMD's new line of CPUs. Could their merging and subsequent business plan have doomed the company? Only time will tell. It was a good run with competition causing card performance to double every generation, but the 2900XT doesn't deliver the mind blowing performance you think 320 shaders would give you. And right now AMD doesn't have any CPU that hang with Intel's newest hardware as far as I know. Whatever the reason, I hope AMD's Barcelona and ATI's HD 2900(or whatever their top end card will eventually be called) can get back in the game.
Monopoly always leads to crappy products. Like Madden football. Only football franchise for a few years and it turned to crap, a really really bad game. People that like it are idiots. The game peaked on XBox around 2004, right before it had a few years of no competition and completely fell apart.