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."

Comments

This is why we need open source 3D drivers...

[kcbrown]

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.

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.