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First R600 Review - The Radeon HD 2900XT
mrneutron2004 writes "Tweaktown seems to have the first review out of the gate on AMD's flagship R600 core. 'Our
focus today is solely on the HD 2900 XT 512MB GDDR-3 graphics card –
it is the first GPU with a fast 512-bit memory interface but what
does this mean for performance? ... After taking a look at the GPU and the card
from PowerColor as well as some new Ruby DX10 screenshots, we will
move onto the benchmarks and compare the red hot flaming Radeon
monster against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX along with the former ATI GPU king, the Radeon X1950 XTX."
"Sorry but our servers aren't up to this amount of hits"
We do need some serious competition from AMD/ATI in order to drive down NVidia's prices. And yes, I'm a gaming enthusiast so this matters to me. I'm rockin som eold 7900GT's and I want to upgrade but only if there's a significant performance improvement per dollar ratio.
There is simply too much glass..
Summary: Down due to server issues - check back later, sorry!
Well TFA is slashdotted, but I think I can guess what it said. This GPU is super fast, super expensive, and super power hungry.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
That was so fast you have to wonder if this isn't blatant self-promotion combined with a hoax. That or a con job. I'm sure they'll drum up a healthy bit of ad revenue from this little tease.
Mirrordot's got the "can't handle the load" page.
Coral Cache only got up to page four before getting the same.
Nothing in Google Cache.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
And the site is dead. This is a hot piece of hardware though - dosent really suprise me that it's down already. ATI really needs to hit one out of the park with it to keep AMD afloat in the coming months.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
easy we need a new card that can handle running areo glass without bringing the system to its knees (did you notice that one of the caps on the board is a blue box with a white glowing thing on top?)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Page 1 [Introduction]
AMD's long awaited R600 DX10 GPU finally arrives
It has been a long time coming but today AMD is finally set to release its massively anticipated GPU codenamed R600 XT to the world with the official retail name of ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. It is a hugely important part for AMD right now, who recently posted massive profit loss figures. It is counting on all these new models, along with the high-end 512MB DDR-3 DX10 part with 512-bit memory interface to kick ass and help raise revenue reports against the current range from the green GeForce team, which is selling like super hot cakes.
The new R600 range of graphics processing units was set to see a release on March 30 (R600 XTX) but due to production issues and lack of decisiveness to make any firm decisions, it got delayed and delayed. It was beginning to look like AMD would letdown its loyal fan base; some even began suggesting the R600 was vaporware. That would have shaken up the industry immensely and thankfully for all, that did not happen. AMD is finally able to introduce some competition to Nvidia's GeForce lineup of cards with its new series of DX10 and Windows Vista ready products.
Eventually the folks at AMD got their act together and made some clear-cut decisions and got production issues under control and underway - probably due to indecisiveness between using GDDR-3 or GDDR-4 and associated cost vs. performance concerns. It was eventually leaked out to the world that the R600 XTX (the highest end model) would be reserved for system integrators due to its size and heat related issues - you may or may not see this GPU in OEM systems from companies like Dell and HP. That model will measure a staggering 12-inches long and probably will not be suitable for every computer case or configuration. It was deemed unacceptable for the consumer retail space and hence was scrapped from all plans.
Today AMD is launching an enthusiast part HD 2900 series with the HD 2900 XT, performance parts with the HD 2600 series including HD 2600 XT and HD 2600 PRO, along with value parts including HD 2400 XT and 2400 PRO. The HD 2600 and 2400 series have had issues of their own and you will need to wait a little longer before being able to buy these various models on shop shelves (July 1st). The HD 2900 XT will be available at most of your favorite online resellers as of today. Quantity is "not too bad" but a little on the short side with most of AMD's partners only getting between 400 - 600 units which is not that much considering the huge number of ATI fans out there. You may want to get in quick and place your order, if you are interested - some AIB companies are not sure when they will get in their next order, too.
Our focus today is solely on the HD 2900 XT 512MB GDDR-3 graphics card - it is the first GPU with a fast 512-bit memory interface but what does this mean for performance? While it is AMD's top model right now, it is actually priced aggressively at around the US$350 - US$399 mark in United States, which puts it price wise up against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. After taking a look at the GPU and the card from PowerColor as well as some new Ruby DX10 screenshots, we will move onto the benchmarks and compare the red hot flaming Radeon monster against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX along with the former ATI GPU king, the Radeon X1950 XTX.
Samsung 225BW (Black) LCD Monitor
Page 2 [HD 2900 XT GPU]
Radeon HD 2900 XT GPU
R600 is AMD's first range of top to bottom DirectX 10 graphics cards with fully certified support for Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. While DX10 GPU support might not be very important right at this moment, soon it will be a requirement to experience the best graphics potential from current games, which are awaiting DX10 patches, and upcoming games such as Crysis, Alan Wake and Unreal Tournament 3. Sadly it is basically impossible for us to provide comparative DX10 benchmark numbers between AMD and Nvidia graphics cards at the moment - AMD gave the press a DX10 benchma
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"We will put it online tomorrow when other sites release their reviews to balance the load."
Tomorrow?! The GPU will be obsolote that time already...
We shall abolish orgasm !
VR-Zone, for example: http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4946&s=1
It seems odd to me that they don't compare the 2900XT to the 8800 GTS 640MB. Comparing it with the top-end 8800 GTX means comparing to a much more expensive card. This review isn't really a fair comparison. If they wanted to include the 8800 GTX for info, fair enough, but they should be comparing the card to its intended competitor. You can't draw fair comparisons when comparing to a much more expensive card.
todo - The developer's equivalent of confession: "Forgive me Father, for I have sinned..."
Enjoy:
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4946&s=1
There isn't really much in the first four pages that we didn't already know from The Inquirer. I also recall them linking to a recent and thorough benchmarking of the HD2900 XT by it-review.net - don't think that was a hoax, so this wouldn't be the first review of the R600 by any measure.
84 degrees Celsius actually isn't that bad - my MSI 7950GX2 starts throttling at 122C (never gets above 85 maxed out, less than 60C idle), and the 8800GTX in the system I'm building for a client throttles at 127C (also never gets near the double digits).
It's just like Tom's Hardware, plenty of fluff pages to increase adviews, and wasting our time while the site is slashdotted (or at least feigning it).
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
This is off-topic, but I was curious if anyone's tried to get one of the current higher-end cards working in a Mac Pro? Are there driver issues in doing so?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Performance per watt is a much more interesting & important figure to release.
:-)
I didn't see that in the article, did I miss it?
I don't understand how CPUs get faster and lower power, yet GFX cards get faster and require new power stations
Uh, nobody's forcing you to buy the top-of-the-line models. All you have to do to get a reasonable price is (shock! horror!) buy a cheaper graphics card - in the mid-range where the price/performance ratio is best.
And if you haven't bought a new graphics card for several years, I don't think you have the faintest idea what you're talking about. Current graphics cards aren't "just 100 MHz faster" or "just 100 megs more RAM" than the graphics cards of a few years ago. They're an order of magnitude faster and have capabilities that your ancient card can't even dream of.
Of course, if you don't care about graphics, then that's fine. You don't have to care about graphics. It's a free country where you can choose to use an old graphics card if that's what you want. But those of us who buy new cards from time to time can get damn good value for money and damn good performance out of our accelerated desktops and the latest games. Without having to pay ridiculous sums of money for cards like this, either.
Fuck you. These new high end cards are SSE on crack (128 parallel FPUs for the GTX), and they speed up my data analysis code enormously. I don't play games with them, so I don't know how much better they are in that domain. Don't presume that your needs are everyone's needs. No one is buying these with a gun to their head.
And it's not only 3D performance that sucks. The 2D performance of their drivers is an ORDER OF MAGNITUDE slower than the open-source driver, and nVidia's driver at XRENDER performance ( ie rendering the webpage you're looking at
Like I said
I mean it is almost unthinkable that ATi would have NO response to nVidia for so long. Prior to the 8800 launch, the chatter was about ATi having a card with unified shaders and nVidia having a more classic card (DX10 requires only unified API, not unified hardware) and so on. Then the 880 gets dropped on the world and ATi does.... nothing. It's been over 6 months, which is essentially a whole cycle in the graphics industry, and there's still nothing.
So it is no wonder everyone wants to know what is up with the 2900. It's not AMD so much as ATi's credibility that is on the line here. If the long delay brings nothing more than something that is as good as what nVidia has been offering for 6 months, and if nVidia hits back with something faster, well it could cost ATi a good bit of market share and mind share.
const LinuxDriver *pDriver = dynamic_cast(Ati::Radeon::HD2900XT::getInstance()) ;
if(pDriver == NULL)
{
throw std::vomit_exception("Sorry for the mess... Try NVidia or Intel, instead...") ;
}
I'm not a gamer, so I'm just looking for something that can handle aero/compiz/beryl and do accelerated HD video decoding (H.264/XviD/Divx) while using the least amount of power, and with just passive cooling. Having not followed graphics cards for a while, I'm sort of out of the loop. What cards out there fit my needs?
I do agree that graphics card pricing schemes are kinda lame, but this isn't just a new card that's slightly more powerful, it's the first card using ATI's/AMD's brand spanking new architecture designed for the brand spanking new directx10.
> brand spanking new directx10.
Is that available on another OS than the abysmal failure known as Windows Vista?
are there any image quality comparisons between the R600's CFAA and the G80's CSAA?
Every single DX10 feature can be used in OpenGL.
(At least, with the nvidia DX10 cards this is true. Obviously I don't have an ATI DX10 card to test it on.)
...they had hosted the site on the HD 2900 XT.
If these number are real then well AMD is having one hell of a bad year so far....
Also slow, but at least working http://www.vr-zone.com/print.php?i=4946
Vote with your dollars. No one is holding a gun to your head. In the meantime, find something worthwhile to post on.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
No it is not needed. It is just another attempt to milk to consumer for every penny they have. Just like the memory market, the graphics card market is price fixing at its finest. Why are we still paying so much for a card that does only 100mhz more? or has 100 more megs of ram? Glad I have'nt bought one in a few years. I could give you a lengthy reply, but most of us already know that what you are saying is just stupid. But since you clearly don't understand how the computer industry works, allow me to explain.
1) X develops hardware x. 2) Y develops hardware y, where y > x. 3) X develops x2, where x2 > y. 4) And so on..
The good thing is that competition usually gets you better pricing and better products. And when people purchase these products, developers adapt to it and find new ways to improve software that takes advantage of the new hardware.
With your thinking, we could go back to the days when Wolfenstein was the latest in graphics and computing, but we don't want that. We need improvements, just like in every other industry.
Also, if you haven't upgraded your computer in years, then you probably don't care much about games. Well, millions of people do. Is Ferrari bankrupt because you're not buying their cars? No, because other people buy them.
Full Tilt
Excuse the crap out of me, but the URL in your profile is for an "email marketing" company, and you're calling these people shady? Well I guess it takes one to know one.
THAN you fucking simpleton, THAN.
VR-Zone had theirs up at 3:51am EST
VR-Zone's X2900XT Pre/Review
Oh, they aren't slashdotted either, but have been getting hit hard from hardware junkies.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I already vote with my dollars. This was my only worthwile post of the day. However, I am not going to stay silent about the industry price fixing and the various nvidia company insiders that have admitted it to me that it is true. If you ever took economics 101 you would know that Monopolies and Ologopolies Can price fix virtually anything they want, especially when collusion is involved. Doubt you would know much about that.
I'm rockin some old 7900GT's
Don't feel too badly. When you upgrade, you can pop off the heatsinks like opening a vintage wine and smell the air that was actually trapped there in 2006. Let your nose travel back in time to those heady days of yesteryear!
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
That will definitely improve my ability to enjoy content without any problems.
"History is the realm of the true lie." A.Szerb
as above.
After reading the first four pages of the article (as posted in the parent's comment) I somehow feel more inclined to buy a Samsung black LCD monitor than the video card.
Having used ATI products for many years, (Since EGA Wonder. For those too young to remember, think DOS3.1. For those to young to remember that, this was before Windows.) their drivers have always left something to be desired. Their Linux drivers suck. Period. The reason I always went with ATI on Linux was because of rock solid FLOSS drivers. Those aren't available for the newer cards. If there was a viable alternative, I would return the card I'm using now. (9600) I will likely never buy ATI again.
Old? You think that's old?! You make me sick!
I recently upgraded from a GeForce 3 Ti to a 6200, you insensitive clod!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Now, if only ATI would tell it's Techs to stop blaming everything else whenever their are card problems.....
Every time I have had issues with their cards, ATI techs have *ALWAYS* blamed other components, other than the ATI card, whenever I called them with an issue. In the end, the problems really were the ATI cards, and not other things.
I even had an ATI Tech start of his diagnosis with "Well, I can argue that the problem may probably be with your motherboard or operating system." Of course, that is a perfectly valid statement, but every time I have dealt with other techs, they always asked me the standard list of Q's first; Operating system, processor, RAM, monitor, settings, motherboard, etc. Never in the entire course of the call did the tech ask me any of those. He just asked me what was happened, and proceeded to immediately blame everything OTHER than the card. In the end, it turned out that the card had burned out and that is wasn't a driver or hardware issue.
Of course, I told the Quality Assurance Rep. when they called to ask me about my experience.
Now I steer clear of ATI. I bought an EVGA card, had an issue, and got it straightened out, with no blame, in a matter of minutes. The problem was my video playback was very dark. Nobody blamed anybody.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
dont be worried, my friend! I'm still running my 64mb geforce2! I can play Unreal Tournament. (1) And Doom! (1)
The drivers used practically every review out there are of the 8.36 revision, it sucks to be frank.
... //Andreas
The 8.37 is 10-15% faster in certain games. The coming revisions are expected to improve this even further, while the 8.38/39 will make another leap in performance.
Wait for the reviews showing the actual performance of the card
I hope not because the 2900 just launched and it fails to impress. It is maybe as good as a 8800GTS (depends on which review method is used) but uses way more power and costs more.
Now normally I wouldn't be so concerned but AMD just got their ass handed to them in the form of the Core 2 Duo and you can see it in the massive loss they've posted. The last thing they need is problems in their graphics division. Console contracts are all well and good, but currently the computer market is where the real money is made, mostly because they push out upgrades so frequently and silly gamers like me buy in to them.
Also, in case you didn't know, the 8800 is a fully unified shader card. At this point, nVidia and ATi are on the same general technical footing with cards. So while ATi may have gotten it out earlier, the research doesn't seem to have paid off in the form of a faster card.
We'll see what the future holds, but I'm concerned. AMD lost a shit ton of money and Intel has Fab 32 up and running, starting to produce 45nm chips, due on the market in a couple months. I'm worried that on both major fronts they are taking a beating and they can only afford to for so long.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
So when will we start seeing HD 2k series motherboards? I'm especially interested in using my x1800 xt (or any 1k series card) to handle physics in parallel with a new 2k series card.
Must be a nice life, you pampered parent-mooching rich kid. Vacationing with the Bush clan in the Hamptons this summer?
2900 XT vs 8800 Ultra
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTM 0MSwxNywsaGVudGh1c2lhc3Q=
Bottom line, the 2900XT is "...a day late and a dollar short."
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Have a Quadro FX 1000 (relatively ancient, but respectable). If I use a handful of windows, yes, it's fast, but once I start opening my typical workload of windows, craws to tens of FPS quickly on most operations.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yeah, what the hell? I'm still using a 9800pro 128MB. I wave my cane at you young ins complaining about 7900GTs. I'll more than likely still pwn you too. :P
I have a now ancient (3+ year old) Radeon 9800 XT, which is still more than decent for graphics. However, I have to have the case open with a Honeywell tornado fan blowing on the card to keep it from locking up in newer games like Vanguard and LotRO. Even venerable City of Heroes and WoW won't last 20 minutes before lockup -- the video card's temp climbs up into the mid 90s Celsius, and that's all she wrote.
The on board fans are all working, and I have blown all the dust out of the (opened) case with a leaf blower, so there's no clogged stuff in there. It's just that this "high end Alienware rig" just can't cut it anymore.
So it sits with the side panel off and the little fan blowing a tornado through there, and the temp stays in the high 70s to low-mid 80s.
Sadly, it took me 6 months to figure this out -- I had stopped playing 3D games for awhile, raging at the product, given I had returned it once before (for a legitimate hardware failure it was having -- pink triangles and green rectangles overlay.)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
^ Worst. Troll. Ever. Not only did nobody reply to it (except for me now), but nobody even bothered modding it. Don't quit your day job, kid.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling