The last really big Radeon launch event was back in October 2005, back in the days when Radeons were still ATI products rather than AMD ones. The Radeon X1K launch was hosted in Ibiza during the closing weekend, and it was one of the better press events of its era! This time around, AMD chose a North African location to show off the latest graphics products, shipping technology journalists from all over the world to the city of Tunis in Tunisia. Like the Radeon X1K launch before it, the Radeon HD 2000 launch involved a whole range of products from entry level up to the high-end. In fact AMD announced no less than ten new graphics solutions for both desktop and mobile platforms. - TrustedReviews

AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB HDCP Ready Review

Considering that NVIDIA stole the march on AMD last year with the release of its GeForce 8 series of DirectX 10 GPU's, the Radeon HD 2000 series has a lot resting on its shoulders, although NVIDIA's inability to initially produce stable Vista drivers has definitely helped AMD's cause. As you've probably noticed already, AMD has dropped the traditional X prefix from the latest generation of Radeon cards, replacing it with HD. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the HD stands for High Definition, and since high definition is probably the most popular buzz phrase of the moment, it's not a bad transition.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT is an immensely complex piece of hardware, with no fewer than 700 million transistors squeezed onto the die. Although AMD was keen to talk about how the Radeon HD 2000 series of chips will be based on a new 65nm process, the first GPU to break cover is actually based on an 80nm manufacturing process. I'm in no doubt that eventually the Radeon HD 2900 XT will transition to a lower 65nm process, and when that happens we could see increased clock speeds and lower power draw. As things stand, the GPU has a core clock speed of 742MHz.

With the Radeon X1000 series of Radeon cards ATI introduced its ring bus memory controller, which potentially allowed unprecedented memory bandwidth, assuming that you had fast enough memory to take advantage of it. Now AMD has evolved the ring bus controller and empowered the Radeon HD 2900 XT card with an astonishing 512-bit memory interface, double the bandwidth seen on any other card to date. Considering the super fast memory interface, it's somewhat perplexing that AMD has decided to equip the first batch of Radeon HD 2000 XT cards with only 512MB of memory.

The heart of the Radeon HD 2900 XT chip is an array of 320 stream processing units, which can turn their hand to pretty much anything. AMD has concentrated on efficient execution with the Radeon HD 2900 XT, rather than employing a bulldozer approach. The key is ensuring that each and every one of the superscalar stream processors is being used to maximum efficiency, in order to render each frame without wasting any resources. One of the keys to this efficient operation is a switch to a unified sharder model, as the dedicated shader model isn't always that efficient.

The AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT is a very impressive piece of hardware that shows real innovation. Features like the tessellation engine will surely bring a huge benefit to real time rendering, and will no doubt become part of the DirectX 10 API at some point. Whether we'll see any games making use of this feature before NVIDIA adopts it too remains to be seen, but AMD should definitely be congratulated for bringing cutting edge features to market. It's also good to see that AMD has finally made CrossFire a simple solution, making use of the internal bridges like the SLI technology.

But I just can't get my head around the fact that AMD/ATI has conceded the performance crown this time around. I've been covering the leapfrog game of graphics hardware for so long that it just seems natural for NVIDIA to launch a card, and then ATI to edge ahead with its launch a few months later. At the very least I thought that AMD/ATI would be looking to match the GeForce 8800 GTX, but it would appear not. Of course AMD is putting a lot of faith in DirectX 10 performance, and once some DirectX 10 games hit the market we'll put both AMD and NVIDIA hardware through its paces again.