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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).
You don't even need a processor to draw pictures on the screen. A simple permanent marker suffices.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
As usual Anandtech is extremely thorough: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2988 &p=26
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[H]ardocp's take: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MT
techPowerUp (Warning, streaming video at the start >.>): http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/HD_2900_XT
The Inquirers expected vapid coverage: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
I think I'll wait for more ATI drivers and some DX10 games before calling this one... Looks a little underwhelming at the moment though. I'm not regreting my 8800GTX purchase yet.
Idle
----
Radeon 2900XT - 183
GeForce 8800 Ultra - 192
GeForce 8800 GTX SLI - 296
Radeon 2900XT Crossfire - 317
Full Load
---------
Radeon 2900XT - 312
GeForce 8800 Ultra - 315
GeForce 8800 GTX SLI - 443
Radeon 2900XT Crossfire - 490
This could get very expensive for people that leave their computers running 24/7.
You can do pretty well estimating your performance if you have a general understanding of how your components work together.
First measure FPS in your favorite app at the lowest resolution. That's the measure of your CPU bottleneck. No matter how nice of a GPU you buy, you'll never get higher FPS than that.
Memory is one of those things you can never have enough. Just don't worry about the bandwidth too much. Your only going to squeeze out just a few frames per second with top of the line RAM. Just watch to see if your comp is hitting the hard drive much and consider more if it is.
Most new games are still GPU limited and this is where you want to focus your attention. Look for benchmarks at resolutions you play at. This is a good baseline of what to expect. Anything over 60fps avg I tend to be happy with, but you may want consider the minimum too. Right now the only benchmarks I've really been interested in are of Rainbow Six: Vegas. It uses the Unreal 3 Engine, and a lot of games are coming out that are going to be using it too. Other benchmarks might be important to you as well, but they tend to rank in the hundreds and so you know performance won't be an issue.
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.
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
You don't even need a processor to draw pictures on the screen.
A real hacker doesn't even need a screen - they just stick their tongue on the HD15* cable and imagine what the screen looks like from the electrical pulses.
(*) Get off of my LAWN!
More
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.
This comes up every single time, so forgive me if I'm not as polite about it as I could be.
The human eye sees ~25-30fps, true, but it does not sample the same way your monitor outputs it. The human eye refreshes at that rate, which means anything that's seen for less than that amount of time leaves a partial imprint. Thus, the motion blur you see when something, even in real life, goes by really fast. Since the monitor is outputting static frames, you don't get that partial imprint, and it looks choppy. Television, on the other hand, does pick up the motion blur, because of the way the cameras work. There are a number of studies showing that we benefit from higher FPS, up to and over 100 sometimes.
Also, there's really no such thing as 32-bit color. I suppose you could put a different number of bits for RGB, and many schemes do, but the 32-bit you're thinking about is RGBA. 24-bit is the exact same thing, without the alpha channel, and we also benefit from far more colors than current hardware outputs, because the current 16.7m colors that are output don't account for much luminosity, and for plenty of other reasons I don't care to look up right now.
When you try to stick your hand through the monitor and pick up a Coke, or catch a running kitten, that's when you can say we've got enough. Until then, please try to at least understand the subject you're discussing, and not try to come off as authoritative when you don't even know what 32-bit color means.
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