AMD Radeon HD 2900XT Review

[Abe]

you can get a 8800gts 320 meg version which is on par with it for a cheaper price

How can you make that comparison when you don't have one? If someone buys a graphics card, they don't get it for 3 months. They get it for at least a year. I would like to see the benchmarks of the 8800gts 320 meg when it was released with it's first drivers against the 2900 with it's first drivers. That would be a better comparison. I am not a fan of game benchmarks because quite often games (such as HL2) work better on a specific brand of card.

so they are releasing a card that cannot compete with nvidia semi mid range cards, suck on out of their thumbs you say, maybe they should just create one in their huge factory with their thousands of workers

If it were that easy, I am sure that they would have had one out 3 months before NVidia.

the 2600 and lower have not been release hence why no one is talking about them, we are debating the 2900xt which is not very good and in my opinion does a piss poor job at competing with 8800gts 320/640 versions

You seem to have a lot of anger and previous bias. Are you not concerned that this will impede your judgement?

99 dolla can get a 8500gt which has been out for awhile now

Note that the 2400 is < $99 and the 2600 is between $99 and $199.

you would think trying to get market share by offering inferior products would be bad business but i guess you just release your product no matter if it can compete or not

AMD can't match the C2D at the moment but does that mean they must close shop? No, they have released new products and adjusted their price point to match or better Intel on price/performance. Anyone who goes out and then buys a P4 from Intel because they have a faster C2D is just shooting themselves in the foot. You get what is best for you at the time. The best bang for your buck. Obviously taking into account the quality of the products but I don't think anyone can dispute that AMD, Intel and NVidia all provide quality products.

 

[killadoob]

1.actually the 320 meg worked perfectly from the get go on windows xp
2. nvidia have no problems releasing their cards in double quick time dont see why ati should be different
3.no bias was just hoping ati would do something special, didnt happen
4. amd had a better product than intel for a long time, then core 2 arrived
AMD did not release an inferior cpu prior to core 2, core 2 made amd's cpu's inferior

do you think amd will now release a next gen cpu thats slower than core 2, again thats my point, why release something that is slower or on par with your comp rather dont release it until you have a product that can sell and performance sells

but we will see how this ati does, maybe the drivers will make it way better the 8800gts's

surely after 7 months of working on a card your drivers should be ready for atleast xp, a platform that has been worked on for a good number of years now

i wonder how the ati drivers with vista

 

[Abe]

i was changed purely by performance which was obvious that core 2 took amd and beat the shyte outta even its flagship product

Now you are showing your bias. You are comparing a product that dominated Intel for 3 years and is probable 5-6 years old to one that is 1 year old. Why not wait for Barcelona before saying that AMDs flagship product is shyte. Intel is alleady making plans to changes for their new chips to use the same memory architecture as AMD.

 

[Abe]

if there selling point is sound via hdmi then the big green machine will keep on racking in the clients and profit because gaming is about performance and not sound via hdmi,

No, gaming is about price/performance. If it were just about performance, everyone would be throwing their money at the $900 Nvidia cards and leave the rest alone.

 

[Abe]

why release something that is slower or on par with your comp rather dont release it until you have a product that can sell and performance sells

They need to sell a good DX10 card, end of story. If they don't have one out, they might as will close their doors now. The architecture of the 2900 is better then the 8800's. It's more scalable. That may not mean much now, but have a look in a year or two and see what is happening then.

 

[killadoob]

abe you do know i was a huge amd fanboi until core 2 eh? i had never intel before that, i had a 400mhz amd all the way up to a 3800+x2 so plz there is no bias here, just pure facts

abe are you telling me amd's flagship product is a cpu that is not even on the market man?

how can a company have a flagship product if its not even out or close to being out, thats not a flagship product until its released

yes price/performance

8800gts good price awesome performance
2900xt pricey and slower than 8800gts at the moment

these are all facts that cannot be denied but if anything you seem to be a huge fanboi of something

in a year or 2 the remaining ati fanboi's might be so put off ATI by the crap stuff they have released they may as well close their doors

ati better hope their cards that compete with the lowely 8600's will be better but by that time everyone would have bought an nvidia card

also when is ati going to release a card to compete with the 8800gtx/ultra?

 

[Abe]

abe are you telling me amd's flagship product is a cpu that is not even on the market man?

Actually, their current flagship product is the Opteron. All I am saying there is don't wipe the floor with them until you have seen their "next-gen" CPU. The AMD X2 6000 is still a damn good product and beats the lower end C2D.

these are all facts that cannot be denied but if anything you seem to be a huge fanboi of something

I am a fan of nothing. I am concerned about problems at AMD resulting in a one horse race for Intel with very high priced CPU's. I actually have an AMD X2 3800+ with an NVidia nForce Motherboard and lowly 7300GS NVidia video card which is adaquate for me. I would like a better video card but can't justify the prices these cards demand. That is why I was saying that it's the start-mid range that is the big money spinner. I also like the avenue that AMD is heading with the GPU providing extra processing power for the CPU.

in a year or 2 the remaining ati fanboi's might be so put off ATI by the crap stuff they have released they may as well close their doors

You keep saying crap. How can a card be crap that is dishing out the kind of performance with alpha drivers that the 2900 is. Yes, it may not be matching the 8880GTX but that does not make it crap. Just because a BMW is not as fast as a Ferrari, does that make it crap?

also when is ati going to release a card to compete with the 8800gtx/ultra?

Who can afford one of those? By all accounts, it sounds like NVidia is just profiteering with that card. That is what you are likely to see more of with a one horse race.

 

[Abe]

Also interesting is this part:

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4946&s=22

"Taking a setting at 1600x1200 with 16xAF, I saw a major increase in performance, particularly Company Of Heroes and Quake 4. Performance went up by 11% on COH and 42% on Quake 4! This shows that the drivers is still very raw on this card, with just a minor driver revision boosting up performance that much, it gives us quite a lot of hope for a fair bit of improvement to come. Let's hope for that!"

 

[ShockG]

Thanks. Generally the shaders are usually better (and it looks like it from the 2900 benchmarks) on ATI cards. Do you think the 2600 Pro would perform better here than the 8600GT, even though it actually has a few less real shaders?

ATI seem to think their new 5 SPU model is much more advanced than the Nvidia method from what I could see on those leaked papers.

You know this debate between different fragment shader implementations and now shader/sp functionality has always been the point of inflexion between the two IHV's.

If you remember with the G71/G70 they had physically 24 shaders with co-issue support so in some situations (optimal) they could output 48 results just like the R580's 48 shaders which while MIMD as well well single issue always.

This time NVIDIA and ATI seemingly have exchanged roles...

 

[eye_suc]

Also interesting is this part:

http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=4946&s=22

"Taking a setting at 1600x1200 with 16xAF, I saw a major increase in performance, particularly Company Of Heroes and Quake 4. Performance went up by 11% on COH and 42% on Quake 4! This shows that the drivers is still very raw on this card, with just a minor driver revision boosting up performance that much, it gives us quite a lot of hope for a fair bit of improvement to come. Let's hope for that!"

thanks abe... and this comes from the benchmarks to which he keeps referring. i suppose he only looked at the pictures. i asked him to read the tomshardware review as well, but to no avail.

as long as there are uninformed resellers, there will be uninformed users.

 

[killadoob]

well we all have our opinions

abe what if a ferrari was priced the same a bmw? would the bmw not be crap?

what i see is a card that performs well in one game and shocking in another
what i see with nvidia is a card that performs well in all games

eye ive not once said any one's opinion in uninformed

i looked at benchies and checked that card do really badly in alot of the tests

time will tell but for now i think that card wont be a big seller to anyone who is not an ati fanboi, maybe if they priced in line with 8600gt would ppl buy it

t 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.

ok maybe im wrong saying this card is crap but if this card is over 4.5k i would say its crap

 

[fishfly]

killadoob you are looking at this angle all incorrectly, yes AMD had a killer product that took intel's market for so long until Intel came with their Core 2 Duo...

ATI has NOT made **** products else they would be Nvidia's biggest competitor... their 9800 took on the 6800, their x1800 took on the 7800 and their x1950xtx took on the 7900gtx but at what cost. Both companies have made bad judgment with the range of cards they've brought out but it's all in the name of advancement.

Nvidia has had much of the mid-range card stake which if you look at the stats about 95% of the market (my assumption) cannot go out and fork out R6000-R10000 for a graphics card... can you honestly say the 7950x2 was the best idea that nvidia brought out?

Right now you are comparing a 8800 product that was released November 2006 - 6 months ago. Since then the drivers version has been refined to make the 8800gtx a stable performance card, yet x2900 card was released to compete - price wise - against the 640mb version of the gts NOT the gtx... plus the x2600 and the x2400 to take some of the mid range segment.
I for one cannot afford a R7000 card that may look beautiful on DX9 with all the bells and whistles that I don't understand jack.

give it 1-2 months time with a new driver revision before making statements on how **** the x2900 is. If you look at ati's details carefully the Tessellation technology is looking like a winner, the dvd encoding/playback quality can't be equalled by the nvidia cards.

The Stream processor may seem like a flaw but if you have good compliers to do the allocation then that could turn out be a great tech.

 

[killadoob]

yup yup i am seeing this now its taken awhile but im getting there, i guess im also just disappointed because the more comp nvidia has the better for us and i really thought ati would bring it

 

[ShockG]

They are you just have to give them a chance....
NV just like ATi make improvements with every silicon outing. For instance the texture samplers on the 8600 are better* or more capable rather than the ones on the G80. So 8900 is going to inherit those and the video playback features of the 8600 (which are once again superior to G80 and R600, but not RV630 and RV610)

By the time we have a few DX10 aware titles you'll see that the HD2900 was a brilliant card

 

[Abe]

what i see is a card that performs well in one game and shocking in another
what i see with nvidia is a card that performs well in all games

This is a good indicator of driver problems. To have a card perform so well in one game and so poorly in another is a pointer where AMD/ATI need to put in the effort.

time will tell but for now i think that card wont be a big seller to anyone who is not an ati fanboi, maybe if they priced in line with 8600gt would ppl buy it

I have a feeling the price will come down in about 3 months.

ok maybe im wrong saying this card is crap but if this card is over 4.5k i would say its crap

That is a problem here. A card that costs $399 in the US should cost R2800 here or at worst R3200 including VAT. The distributors are adding whopping profits on all of our stuff. They buy the stuff for a discount on that same $399, lets say $300. Their landing costs are about R2300 including shipping Ex Vat and they sell it to the dealers for R3500. Not too bad, R1200 profit per card or 50%.

 

[eye_suc]

http://www.prophecy.co.za/gecube-radeon-hd1900xt-512mb-pcie-p-21884.html

sadly, this is more than likely what we would be paying. :/ even at that price point i am still sold.

doob, might even try to kick your donkey in 2142, although more than likely i will end up as a bloody pile

 

[killadoob]

heck no man, i suck at that game never got into it lol if anyone will be a bloody pile tis me

 

[Abe]

That annoys me no end. Even if you look at the CPU prices in the US compared to what we pay here. Someone is making a killing and it's not the dealers.

 

[eye_suc]

That annoys me no end. Even if you look at the CPU prices in the US compared to what we pay here. Someone is making a killing and it's not the dealers.

nope, not the dealers, they also suffer... i think it might be Mr Taxman the is shafting us with the cactus

 

[Abe]

nope, not the dealers, they also suffer... i think it might be Mr Taxman the is shafting us with the cactus

Can't be "him". If I remember, duties were scrapped but if not, the max on that type of item would be about R420 which still means there is another R1000 extra in there somewhere.