It has been quite some time since we checked out a new ATI/AMD product and with their latest generation of graphics cards being no less than 9 months late, it is no secret to why we have been unable to review their products. AMD has had a lot of issues to work through over the past several months and this is primarily why the R600 has been so late. The AMD acquisition of ATI created even more problems and the fact that they were developing a product that featured more transistors than any CPU in existence did not help either. Needless to say it has been a rough road for AMD and their R600 architecture, and everything and anything that could create a problem has. - Legion Hardware

ASUS Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire Ready Review

Nevertheless after much delay the new Radeon HD series have been released on the 14th of May and ten new graphics cards have been named. Today we have the Radeon HD 2900 XT which is of course based on the R600 core using an 80nm design process. This version features just 512MB of onboard GDDR3 memory clocked at 1656MHz using a 512-bit wide memory bus interface. Combined with a core clock of 757MHz, the Radeon HD 2900 XT can produce a memory bandwidth of 102.4GB/s, which is greater than the memory bandwidth of the GeForce 8800 GTX accelerator.

In fact on paper the Radeon HD 2900 XT looks to be a more impressive product than the GeForce 8800 GTX. The GeForce 8800 GTX brought a shift in GPU functionality and capability, moving away from the traditional pixel and vertex shaders we had got familiar with, to a collection of floating point processors also called stream processor units. The GeForce 8800 GTX version featured 128 stream processors clocked at 1.35GHz. Then we have texture address units of which the GeForce 8800 GTX accelerator features 32 of these, along with 24 rasterization operator units.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT on the other hand features a staggering 320 stream processors, while there are 32 texture and just 16 rasterization units. However in light of the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card, NVIDIA cunningly prepared a new product designed to stand up against this new Radeon. Known as the GeForce 8800 Ultra, this new overclocked GTX features a greater core clock, bringing the frequency to 612MHz. Furthermore the memory frequency has been boosted as the memory frequency has been increased from 1.50GHz, which effectively pushed the memory bandwidth figure to 103.7GB/s.

Interestingly the Radeon HD 2900 XT is said to go on sale at just $400, making it significantly cheaper than the GeForce 8800 Ultra and even cheaper than the GTX. So after all is said and done, is the Radeon HD 2900 XT targeting the GeForce 8800 GTX or the lower GTS version? Considering two Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics cards can be purchased for a single GeForce 8800 Ultra, this new Radeon HD 2900 XT must be pretty amazing value. However, this all depends on how the Radeon HD 2900 XT stacks up against the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards, especially in terms of performance.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT has been called a lot of things over the past few days and to be honest we were expecting a complete dud, but it just isn't! Yes the Radeon HD 2900 XT is not as powerful as we were expecting, the drivers probably are not as polished as they would be and the card runs hot as hell but for $400 this product is quite good value. While we found the performance to be a bit up and down, there was one thing that remained fairly constant and that was the Radeon HD 2900 XT's lead over the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards. The main point of concerns is really the power consumption.

Should the Radeon HD 2900 XT mature quite well over the next few months, it could become a real threat to the GeForce 8800 GTX, particularly given it costs significantly less. In some games the Radeon HD 2900 XT has proven to already be faster than the GeForce 8800 GTX, while in most others it is a little bit slower, and then in some games, such as Supreme Commander, it is much slower. So the Radeon HD 2900 XT is a mixed bag of results then and obviously AMD knows this, hence the $400 price tag!