Slashdot Mirror
AMD Finally Launches Low-Price DX10 Cards
Steve Kerrison writes "The Radeon 'R600' HD 2900 XT was late coming, and so by extension are the lower cost parts derived from it. The Radeon HD 2400 and 2600s are now available, just the same, with pricing aimed at knocking mid-range GeForce 8 series cards off people's shopping lists. There's more to a graphics card than price; performance and driver functionality are key too. HEXUS had some fun and games testing the new Radeons: 'The hardware designers may now be sitting back, content that their DX10-supporting midrange SKUs are at least as compelling as the competition's. But, and it's a big, big but, the current drivers aren't realizing the kind of performance we'd expect from a knowledge of the Radeon HD 2600 XT's setup.'" A very useful article ... unfortunately spread across a dozen pages with no 'print view' available.
Usually when I read these reviews, the first page that I read is the conclusions. I typically don't have the attention span to read through the whole thing, so this lets me get the drift of the article without sucking up too much time.
a ge=12
The link to the conclusion page: http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=9187&p
I found it humorous that the first line on that page is "Congratulations on getting this far, folks.".
PC Perpsective
4 26&pid=2
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=
Anyone find others?
This HotHardware review goes into a bit more detail and other benchmarks as well - http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/ATI_Radeon_HD_ 2600_and_2400_Performance/
FTA - "Throughout all of our in-game and synthetic testing the fastest of the three new mainstream Radeon HD 2000 series cards we tested in this article, the Radeon HD 2600 XT, performed about on par with or sometimes well behind a GeForce 8600 GT. The more affordable Radeon 2600 Pro came in a few percentage points behind the 2600 XT, and as expected the 2400 XT fell in behind the 2600 Pro.
We also spent some time testing the AVIVO HD video engine in these new cards with a few SD and HD workloads, but weren't able to compile all of the data in time for launch. We will be updating this article in the next day or so, with the results from our AVIVO HD testing as well. "
I cannot say AMEN BROTHER! loud enough!
I have been making postings on every forum in which I regularly participate regarding ATI's horrible customer satisfaction performance. I tell everyone I can about my replacing the video device in my Dell Laptop with an nVidia board. (Fortunately, many Dell laptops offer that kind of flexibility and there is no shortage of eBay sellers selling the parts I seek.) Chief complaints:
* Linux drivers not keeping up with the rest in features and supported technologies (like AIGLX and X.org 7.2)
* Linux driver hardware support falling off with NO legacy support
* ATI misleading (telling lies in my opinion) the Linux-using public (recall the slashdot article about ATI answering questions?)
I too don't mind so much about the Free-as-in-beer thing... OSS would be better, of course but what are you going to do? Well I had made my decision. I voted with my dollars and spent $150 to move away from ATI. I didn't spend the money, so much, to move to NVidia... if I felt like the Intel option would perform as well, I'd have gone with Intel just as easily. No, I spent my money to move away from ATI and I think that's an important distinction to make.
So again, I urge anyone with an opinion (similar to my own) to tell ATI about it. Make them know there's a lot of unhappy ATI users out there and those numbers are decreasing for the wrong reason!
AMD.ATI really needed to have some good news with these cards, but they blew it with the first impressions. I can only hope they can stay in the game be releasing some quality drivers to take advantage of these new cards. From the looks of it, 8600 hardware is peanuts compared to the 2600. With the expected prices, they should be killing the mid/low range DX10 market. This does not bode well. I look forward to reviews of retail cards, but my enthusiasm has dropped. Seems as if nVidia was almost counting on AMD.ATI to release shitty drivers and hiked up the price of low end DX10 as much as they could.
Riiight... I've had the same XP install for 2 years now, and have upgraded the drivers dozens of times. First with my 9700 AIW, then X800 XL, now X1800 XL. No issues at all removing old drivers, or installing new ones. Including the capture drivers for the 9700 all in wonder.
This situation is exactly what the "Repagination" extension for Firefox was created to thwart: it collapses multiple linked pages into one. It's not perfect (page headers and such are replicated, too), but with Aardvark or RIP or similar extensions the result could be cleaned up for printing or archiving.