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AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT Reviewed
J. Dzhugashvili writes "The folks at The Tech Report have whipped up a detailed expose of the new AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card's architecture and features, with plenty of benchmarks. While the card dazzles with 320 stream processors, a 512-bit memory bus, and oodles of memory bandwidth, its performance and power consumption seem disappointing in the face of Nvidia's six-month-old GeForce 8800 graphics cards."
At least on Windows. I got a free el-cheepo x1300 which I ended up replacing my GF6600 with. Sure the latter scored better in 3D Mark whatever, but at the cost of jerky frame rates in non-mainstay games. Such as Outrun 2006 (Which is a bit odd since I heard Sega use the GF6600 in their arcade machine).
Anyway, while these x2900 do not seem to be great performers I suspect their Vista drivers are better. As a Vista user the GF8800 is right now out of the question, less the driver situation have changed recently.
Whomever gets good DX10 drivers out first, got a sale from me.
Oh you can. You only need to make a processor-to-VGA converter cable. This should be trivial for someone with your intelligence level.
At the present time, the problems that AMD inherited when it bought ATI don't really matter greatly (except as a perception), because only enthusiasts buy graphics cards that cost as much as a basic PC. It's not the volume market.
However, unless AMD sorts all this out over the next couple of years, they are in for a huge amount of very costly trouble, and it may be terminal to their future in the desktop market. The problems ahead lie in the area of CPU-GPU integration.
We are told that AMD purchased ATI because they needed graphics expertise for a projected future in which scalar and vector processing is merged in an extremely parallel multi-core processor architecture. It's easy to see the reasoning here, as tight integration would decrease communication latencies and power consumption simultaneously. The benefits of tight integration are likely to be collosal, and AMD knows this from their success with hypertransport.
Unfortunately, such tight integration also means that ATI's remarkable incompetence at producing even half-decent drivers will bring AMD down badly, unless something is done about it. And short of firing the whole ex-ATI driver team, it's hard to see how to resolve this issue. You can't resolve it by trying to educate bad software engineers, that's for sure.
AMD have quite a problem on their hands.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I use a mac G4/dual 500 (i.e. an OLD old machine) as my 24/7 box - cost about $200 bucks, and does just fine quietly humming away in the corner drawing 75 watts.
If your idle numbers are right, you'd better have a good friend at the power company if you plan on leaving that machine running 24/7.
I opt out of mod points, but someone mod this douchebag down. The "quote" contains a spoiler for something.
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AMD has not released and probably will not release for some time a direct competitor to the 8800gtx or the 8800ultra.
The 2900XT is a competitor to the 2 8800GTS models.
They are avoiding the top end market because more often then not the risk of that market does not meet the reward.
They are playing little ball to compare to base ball, trying to manufacture base hits and runs not home runs.
Offering 3 Cards starting at less than $100 and going to $400ish is a good strategy for the main stream market.
The HDMI dongle innovation (carries video and audio on the video card because all of the new cards have an audio processor on them) is a boon for them as well, helping carry the image of media center capable video cards, for a newer computer user age.
These will help push down prices on all of the cards within that price range. And possibly help push innovation in the marketplace.