While AMD will tell us that R600 is not late and hasn't been delayed, this is simply because they never actually set a public date from which to be delayed. We all know that AMD would rather have seen their hardware hit the streets at or around the time Vista launched, or better yet, alongside G80. But the fact is that AMD had quite a few problems in getting R600 out the door. While we couldn't really get the whole story from anyone, we heard bits and pieces here and there during our three day briefing event. Apparently, the first spin of R600 silicon could only communicate over the debugging interface. While the upside is that the chip wasn't totally dead, this is not a good problem to have. - AnandTech

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB HDCP Ready Review

In another unique move, there is no high-end part in AMD's R600 lineup. The Radeon HD 2900 XT is the highest end graphics card in the lineup and it's priced at $399. While we appreciate AMD's intent to keep prices in check, the justification is what we have an issue with. According to AMD, it loses money on high end parts which is why we won't see anything more expensive than the Radeon HD 2900 XT this time around. The real story is that AMD would lose money on a high end part if it wasn't competitive, which is why we feel that there's nothing more expensive than the Radeon HD 2900 XT accelerator.

The delays and lack of a high-end would be beyond perfect if the Radeon HD 2900 XT could do to NVIDIA what the G80 launch did to ATI, unfortunately the picture just isn't that rosy. ATI's latest and greatest doesn't exactly deliver the best performance per watt, so while it doesn't compete performance wise with the GeForce 8800 GTX it requires more power. An ultra high-end power requirement in a sub $400 graphics card isn't exactly ideal. Despite all of this, there's a great deal of cool technology in the R600, and as ATI is now a part of a CPU company, we received more detail on the GPU than we gotten before.

From a very high level, we have the same capabilities we saw in the G80, where each step in the pipeline runs on the same hardware. There are a lot of similarities when stepping way back, as the same goals need to be accomplished, data comes into the GPU, gets setup for processing, shader code runs on the data, and the result either heads back up for another pass through the shaders or moves on to be rendered out to the framebuffer. The obvious points are that R600 is a unified architecture that supports DirectX 10. The set of requirements are very firm, so we won't see any variations on the features.

Our first look shows a huge amount of stream processing power, meaning 320 in total. These are a little different than NVIDIA's stream processors. First of all, most of the stream processors are simpler and aren't capable of special function operations. For every block of five stream processors, only one can handle either a special function operation or a regular floating point operation. The special function stream processor is also the only one able to handle integer multiply, while others can perform simpler integer operations. This means is that each of the five stream processors in a block must run instructions from one thread.

We have a very delayed launch from AMD that features a part that consumes quite a bit of power and doesn't compete with the competition's high end offering. Despite the delays, despite the quirks, and despite the lack of performance leadership, AMD has built a good part. It might not be as exciting as an ultra high end card, and it certainly isn't as power efficient as a GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra, but it has quite a few positives that make it an interesting product, and more competition is always a good thing. But that doesn't mean that NVIDIA can now just relax and wait for the next big thing.

For now, R600 is a good starting place for AMD's DirectX 10 initiative, and with a bit of evolution to their unified shader hardware it could eventually rise to the top. We aren't as excited about this hardware as we were about G80, and there are some drawbacks to AMD's implementation, but we certainly won't count them out of the fight. Power efficiency on 65nm remains to be seen, and there is currently a huge performance gap NVIDIA has left between the GeForce 8600 GTS and the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. If AMD is able to capitalize here with the Radeon HD 2600 series, they will certainly have a leg to stand on.

In the meantime, we are just happy that R600 is finally here after such a long wait. Let's hope for AMD's sake that the next revision of their hardware doesn't take quite so long to surface and manages to compete better with six month old competing products. And we absolutely love the architectural detail AMD has gone into with R600.