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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).
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.
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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