Radeon HD2900XT review

Is red dead? Can the R600 give AMD the fight it needs to stay in the ring with Nvidia?

NVIDIA continues to dominate the DirectX 10 field, and has done so for a good six months. Well, sort of – while it may have had a DirectX 10-capable card, until very recently there’s been three-fifths of bugger all in regards to DirectX 10 content.

So those who argue ATI is late to the party have missed the point – the party hasn’t even started yet and NVIDIA arrived a few hours early, albeit in a very pretty green dress, wooing all the DirectX 9 boys and developing a fierce following before the other girls even arrived.

Convoluted metaphors aside, AMD needed something amazingly good to overcome NVIDIA’s 8800 series, and what we got was… odd. As with all classic stories, we should start at the beginning.

In terms of products, the new cards are definitely AMD-owned, while the ATI name lives on as a brand – so rather than just being a Radeon, everything is now an ‘ATI Radeon’.

Also changed is the ‘X’ prefix that has been with us for so long. So intent on the cinema experience is AMD that all products now begin with an ‘HD’ – hence what we are looking at today is the AMD ATI Radeon HD2900XT.

Those familiar with ATI nomenclature will realise the XT is one rung down from the top in the performance stakes, the numero uno pooch usually bearing the ‘XTX’ moniker. For now the 80nm HD2900XT is it for the top-end for AMD, which is curious as price/performance-wise it’s aimed squarely at the 8800 GTS – leaving NVIDIA to run away with the pole position on two cards, the 8800 GTX and 8800 GTX Ultra.

At this stage there are no plans to bring an XTX to the retail market – the XTX pictures surfacing on the Web were simply XTs with a different cooler for the OEM market – although several rumour mills are churning out something about Q3 of this year. This will quite possibly be a 65nm revision of the top-end card, because when the mainstream cards hit in June – HD2400/2600, in Pro and XT variants – they’ll already be on the 65nm process.

There are two amusing things about the launch of AMD’s DirectX 10 line. The first is that the oft-delayed HD2900XT was pushed back a final time so AMD could launch an entire family simultaneously. Except that the mainstream cards were instead ‘paper-launched’ with the HD2900XT, and essentially delayed again. This foible allowed NVIDIA to get its 8500 GT, 8600 GT and 8600 GTS onto the market. One can only assume this is as a result of AMD tackling the massive task of integrating ATI into its bulk.

The second thing is the cards are bundled with Half-Life 2 Black Box vouchers – featuring Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. Those with a decent memory will remember the debacle surrounding the X1K series, which was meant to be launched along with Half-Life 2 and include a copy of the game – only to have Valve delay by over a year and leave ATI having to supply vouchers instead, and, if you’ll pardon the pun, red-faced.

Well Valve almost did it again to ATI, cancelling the Black Box after all the vouchers had been printed and deciding to only sell the Orange Box – same deal, but with the original HL2 and Episode 1. Fortunately this decision only affected the retail version of Black Box – ATI card buyers will still have access to all the games through Steam.

But enough about Valve and NVIDIA – we’re here today to look at AMD’s 700-million transistor monster and decide whether it was worth the wait.

	AMD HD2900XT	NVIDIA 8800 GTS
Fabrication process	80nm HS	90nm
Core speed (MHz)	742	500
Memory speed (MHz)	1650	1200
Shader domain speed (MHz)	742 (core)	1600
Number of shader units (calculated differently)	320	96
Memory capacity (MB)	512	320/640
Memory bus width	512-bit	320-bit
Memory type	GDDR3	GDDR3

The HD2900XT stripped of its heatsink and fan. Mmm... naked.