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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."
AMD/ATI losing out to nVidia in the extreme power cards.
AMD/ATI losing out to Intel with the onboard graphics.
nVidia has a better closed source linux driver than ATI.
At the moment the only appeal of ATI is there mediocre graphics cards have open source 2D+3D drivers on Linux with R200(helped by ATI) or R300(no help from ATI/AMD) drivers.
At the moment AMD's best strategy is to build some fantastic onboard graphics chips for their AMD processors and try and beat nVidia by basically making and AMD chip + on board graphics as brilliant combination (ie no need to add an aftermarket card).
Graphics cards are all too expensive anyway. You shouldn't have to pay more than the actual processor just to draw pictures on the screen.
The hardware probably screams. But ATI has a reputation for really shitty drivers. Without solid, fast, high-quality drivers, fast hardware doesn't matter as much.
NVidia has typically produced fast drivers. They're not open-source, but they're at least good.
If ATI can't get its shit together and write some decent drivers, the only reasonable option for them would be to open-source their 3D drivers so that the community can fix them properly. And I expect the community would do just that, because a lot of developers are also avid PC gamers, so they have a personal stake in it.
It'll be interesting to see where this heads, given the statements made by ATI about open-sourcing their drivers, but I'm not going to hold my breath over it. For now, it's NVidia for my gaming rigs. That'll change as soon as ATI actually open-sources their full 3D drivers.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
The 2900XT offers great value though. It sucks power like 12 pound new born, sure, but in modern game engines it clocks just a hair under the 8800GTX. The difference is literally just a few frames. Not bad for a part thats up to $200 cheaper.
At least wait for a june refresh if you're going to buy nvidia.
Here's a quote from TFA that I also found quite unnerving... "Also, we found that our 700W power supply wasn't up to the task of powering a Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire rig. In order to achieve stability, we had to switch to a new Thermaltake 1kW PSU with a pair of eight-pin connectors that AMD supplied."
Now don't get me wrong, I love to see these types of improvements in real time graphics rendering, but you know there's something wrong with the industry if they can ask PC Enthusiasts with a straight face to use power supplies powerful enough for Air Conditioning Units (albeit small ones) in their computers. That being said, I still commend the improvements made and I look forward to the lower end, passively cooled, versions becoming available for my next HTPC.
The only consistency in life is the lack thereof
You had me for a moment there, but then you went and used the old "ATI makes bad drivers" shtick again. I understand that their Linux support has been more or less non-existent, but believe it or not, ATI drivers have been quite solid on the Windows side of the house for a while now.
We all know ATI had really poor driver development in the 90s. However, for at least the past five years or so -- since the introduction of the Radeon 9x00 DirectX9 (R300) generation hardware, their drivers have been at least as good as nVidia's, and in many ways better. They continue to get a bad rap here mostly because of their lack of Linux support and the difficult to defeat consensus that was built up over many years of bad drivers.
Now, onto R600. They really blew this generation. *But* it's not the driver team's fault per se. ATI simply took some gambles in the design phase and those gambles didn't pan out. It probably doesn't help that they had the XBox 360 and the AMD acquisition as distractions during development. On the plus side, it turns out that the 2900XT has enormous headroom -- it's going to overclock like crazy... but guess what? Thermally and power-wise, it's a disaster. Though the silicon may well clock 50-100% higher and blow away nVidia's 8800GTX, it turns out that it eats 600W PSUs for breakfast -- that's the real reason AMD couldn't release a high-end part: Few except for hardcore overclockers have 700W power supplies ready to feed this thing. That, and no one in their right mind wants a computer that uses 400+ watts idling on Microsoft Word. So AMD had to settle for the mid-market, with mediocre performance that's within an acceptable (albeit still very high) power envelope.
At far as driver quality goes, sure they've theoretically had a long time to get things right this time around, but there are bound to be issues with any newly designed generation of video hardware as complex as this. nVidia had many problems with the 8800 series when it first came out 6 months ago, but consensus is that it's settled down nicely with the recent Forceware 1.58 release. Anyway, I just wanted to point out that I don't believe it's the AMD driver team that really deserves to take the hit this time around. If AMD can deliver on the long-term promise of integrated CPU+GPUs, I think this R600 fiasco will go down as a temporary deviation in the grand scheme of things.