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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."
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.
They do note that they find the card priced aggresively. This is the highest end graphics card they are producing for the retail space. Direct competitors do not always cost the same thing. They may be trying to undercut the price of the nvidia card which is why the review compares the similarily featured rather than the similarily priced.
This signature would be better if I was creative.
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.
Um, yeah, notice how those ads arent hosted on the page itself. It's not their bandwidth which is being used.
The ads, like Ross said, are just links. I could send you to a page that has one word and a hundred adds or to a page with 500 words and no adds. Though the 500 words take up less space than the hundred ads it has more of an effect on the server than the ads do because the ads are hosted on random servers across the internet.
Sure, ATI had no response to NVidia in the gaming computer graphics market, but that isn't the only market that these companies operate in. ATI's lead over NVidia with the Radeon 9700 didn't kill NVidia, and this current situation with the 8800 having such a huge lead won't kill ATI.
From what I know, ATI was much busier then NVidia was with the "next gen" consoles. The GPU inside the XBox 360 is quite sophisticated, and the Wii doesn't just have a faster variant of the GameCube GPU. ATI spent real research time on these products, and this is when ATI came up with their solution for unified shader units on the GPU. So here we are in May of 2007, and ATI has shipped way more unified shader products then NVidia, simply because their product was inside a console that has sold millions. The 8800 series likely hasn't hit a million. Where as NVidia went with a GPU design mirrored off their 7x00 series of products for the Playstation 3, while trying to work out their own unified shader cards.
I think ATI made the better move here. They have been recouping the research money on unified shader GPUs from a much bigger market segment, though it does make it appear they are lagging behind in the PC gaming sector.
The good news for gamers is neither company is likely to go away anytime soon, because they both are in many different markets. This is a lesson 3dfx didn't learn, and many other now dead or almost dead graphics providers.
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