Page 26 - The Verdict

The Verdict

Aah finally ... The last page, you say :) Sorry, new technology requires a lot of explaining, and well, let's be honest here; you are used to our 25+ page reviews, right? We do such extensive articles to be able to show you as much as we can. You guys need to make an informed decision and that's the service we provide. I hope you enjoyed this technical and performance overview; trust me ... it was a lot of work.

Okay, so here's how the verdict goes. AMD-ATI has had a very rough time launching this product. It was delayed and delayed and then delayed again. Obviously when you have 700 million transistors in a product, yet don't see the performance you expect, you try and solve tweak things. Now let's be fair here. Everybody was expecting and hoping for a product that would wipe the floor clean with NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX/Ultra. That's just not the case. Performance wise the Radeon HD 2900 XT has a very hard time coming even close to these product in a lot of scenarios.

It is what it is, and the HD 2900 XT performance wise ended up in the lower to mid part of the high-end segment. Sometimes it has a hard time keeping up with a 320MB 8800 GTS, and in other scenarios we see performance close or equal to the GeForce 8800 GTX. Now that would be weird if we all had to pay 600 USD/EUR for it. AMD knows this, and knows it very well. This is why, and honestly this is fantastic, the product is launched at a 399 MSRP. Now I have been talking with a lot of board partners already and here in Europe the product will launch at 350 EUR; and that's just golden.

So we need to leave the uber-power-frag-meister-performance idea behind us and mentally position the product where it is and compare it with the money you have to pay for it. For your mental picture; performance wise I'd say GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB is a good comparative product (performance wise). Then the opinion will change as you'll receive absolutely a lot of bang for your bucks here. At 350 EUR you'll have a good performing DirectX 10 compatible product, new programmable tessellation unit. It comes with 512 megs of memory. It comes with a state of the art memory controller, offers HDCP straight out of the box, all cards have HDMI connectivity with support for sound and if that alone is not enough, you receive a Valve game-bundle with some very hip titles in there for free. So yeah, you really can't go wrong there.

The negatives then; only two really. First off is power consumption. I know that power is a cheap commodity, yet the card is rated at a peak of give or take 215 Watts, and that's just a lot. In a high-end system our power-draw was 400 Watts for the entire PC. So chances are that with the HD 2000 XT also comes a PSU upgrade. To make it slightly worse, if you want to overclock you'll need a PSU with the new 8-pin power connector as well. And at this time these are still rare (review here).

The second negative just has to be the fan. It's not dramatic in 2D desktop mode, really. But once you start gaming, you'll definitely hear it. And God forbid, if your card overheats to 100 Degrees C (which is not that awkward) you'll have a local hair-dryer available to you. So my recommendation here is in overclocked situation to be on the lookout for water-cooling or just wait for board-partners like HiS to come up with another solution. For generic usage however, please don't worry.

The positives: Image quality of the HD 2900 XT is just excellent. I could have gone in-depth but at one point this article has to stop right? No, the the new HQ anisotropic filtering is just looking great. Then again, it already was exceptionally good on previous generation products. The new CSAA modes are looking to be promising as well. Surely we did not get all modes to work properly but hey, we had to deal with an alpha driver. ATI has a good reputation in fixing this stuff in a timely manner, so we'll look at these modes closer once working properly. Beta drivers or not, pretty much any game we tested, no re-phrase, all games as tested worked without any issues. The one thing that initially had an issue was 3Dmark. Yet FutureMark will release a patch for this soon as it has to do with Futuremark's system diagnostic scan and thus is not an ATI issue.

What I also have to mention is that the new Avivo HD; or more precisely UVD decoder is looking to be awesome for the RAdeon HD 2400 and 2600 that is. Once you decode high-definition movies over the GPU you'll be surprised by the excellent video quality, it's really that good. The huge positive here is obviously that the entire decoding process is managed on the graphics card. Your CPU cycles are left alone, watching HD 1080P 20 MBit/s HD movie full screen on a 2560x1600 monitor and still have the CPU utilized 10-15% is really very interesting to observe; unfortunately not a feature that is present on the 2900 XT.

So there you have it, guys and gals. The positives and negatives all sum up to an opinion, one that you have to make your decisions on. You will be charmed with the new Radeon HD 2900 XT if you can life with the knowledge of that power consumption and the fact that it's a noisy product. Performance wise at 350 EUR this Radeon HD 2900 XT offers an incredible amount of bang for your bucks, heaps of functionality and extremely good image quality. For whatever reason, what caught my attention is whenever a game makes a lot use of pixel shaders the overall performance starts to rise massively. And considering the future of games, that's a very good thing.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT has a hard launch; and thus is available today in high volumes. In another article we'll go in-depth on the HD 2400 and HD 2600 cards, yet for these cards we can only give you the information we gave you. That part is a paper launch with availability likely in July.

Article downloads

• Valve Blackbox trailer - included games from blackbox coulon (68MB).
• Call of Juarez DirectX 10 Benchmark (movie) - 158MB
• Call of Juarez FirePlace (movie) shows render difference between DX9/DX10 - 17MB
• Call of Juarez Mountains & Rocks (movie) shows render difference between DX9/DX10 - 14MB

To seek the very best prices on Radeon HD 2900 XT click here to see an overview taken from the Guru3D PriceGrabber comparison database. Should you like to discuss this article or chat about R600, please visit this dedicated forum thread.

Many thanks go out to AMD/ATI for making this review happen. Now go and dream away at these lovely rendered lips from Ruby.

Ruby technology demo as rendered on the Radeon HD 2900 XT