AMD ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series.

Featuring AMD ATi Radeon HD 2900 XT - A closer look into the cat's eye.

Hey everybody, and welcome to the Radeon HD 2000 Series article. Oh my gosh ... Have we all been waiting for this release a long time, or what? I mean initially we (the press) expected this release late last year already. And due to a complexity of issues (AMD and ATI merger), likely fabrication issues and a shift in fabrication process things got delayed; massively. So right now it's April 25th and today 175 press-members are returning from a long technical briefing in Tunisia and I can happily report to you that AMD has now released the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of product... well, sort of.

What we'll be doing today is take a look at their new high-end product. As we speak, AMD is launching no less than five desktop graphics cards, but it is however not a hard launch. Worldwide you'll only see the one product released and available based on a 80nm fabrication process; the Radeon HD 2900 XT, a product that is going to be discussed and has been discussed a lot for sure.

So there are four other products as well. ATI is also launching an all new Radeon 2400 and 2600 series (low- and mid-range). These products will be based on the newer 65nm fabrication production process.

Let's have a brief overview of the five new graphics cards and on the next page we'll go a little deeper into the silicon that is Radeon HD 2000.

• Radeon HD 2900 XT
• Radeon HD 2600 XT
• Radeon HD 2600 Pro
• Radeon HD 2400 XT
• Radeon HD 2400 Pro

Obviously for all products, we are talking about the next-gen product series here and that means 100% DirectX 10 compatible products, so you'll understand that we'll also talk a little about DX10, the Unified Shader Architecture with these lovely stream processors; a new function on the 2000 Series called Tessellation and last but not least; Avivo HD.

So we'll go rather in-depth today, yet bear in mind that we'll only test and thus benchmark the new Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card. Now earlier on in the introduction I already told you guys that this is going to be a much discussed product. Why? As everybody expected it to be the new high-end product that would annihilate NVIDIA's excellent GeForce 8800 GTX series. That's not the case. You guys clearly have seen rumours, leaked benchmarks and what not. The HD 2900 XT as we'll show is a really fine piece of hardware but performance wise it sits among the GeForce 8800 GTS cards; if that gives you a better idea. The more interesting thing is it'll be a high-end product at a very interesting price-level. 399 USD. I've talked to a couple of board partners already, and here in Europe this red goblin is selling for 350 EUR !

That really doesn't sound bad, eh? AMD-ATI will take it a step further as all HD X2900 XT boards will be HDMI/HDCP ready, have Avivo HD and will be shipped with three full free games: Half-life2: Episode 2; Team Fortress 2 and Portal. These games are included as coupon (code) and you must download it yourself through Valve's steam. But yeah... great stuff.

Well; let's not get ahead of things ...  We have a review to show you. Next page please !