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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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9 580
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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.
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!
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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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