The graphics card food chain end with a high-end product. Much has been speculated and discussed. First off, let me shoot down one of the biggest rumours. You've actually seen benchmarks and everything, yet the HD 2900 XTX is not announced or released. At least not in this time-frame. So that leaves us with the Radeon HD 2900 XT. It's the product we have been testing for a while now. And although we did that with mixed feelings (performance wise) we can not deny that it can become a very popular product. Really, it's showing nice high-end performance, yet it's priced cheap for a high-end segment product. The MSRP is 399 USD folks ... that's amazing for a 700 million transistor counting product. Yes, a 700 million tranistors product from which the architecture really is based off the Xbox 360; which is good. As we now have 64-bit (128-bit FP texture filter) HDR capability, have improved HQ anisotropic filtering and even 8192x8192 HR textures.
The AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900-series features 320 stream processors, over twice as many as NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTX, yet clocked way slower. AMD couples the 320 stream processors with a 512-bit memory interface with eight channels (8x64-bit obviously). CrossFire support is now natively supported by the AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900-series; the external CrossFire dongle is a thing of the past, wahoo!
Much like NVIDIA's G80 silicon, AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 2900-series also possesses the ability of physics processing with the help of the unified shader architecture, DirectX 10. Yes, physics can be done through shaders.
New to the ATI Radeon HD 2900-series are integrated HDMI output capabilities with 5.1 surround sound. Let's take a look at the product, bundle and then go a little more in-depth feature by feature, shall we?
Three-in-One - Black Box Bundle
If 350 EUR for this card still sounds a bit steep to you, AMD is sweetening up the deal even a little bit more. It is a fact that with every HD 2900 XT you purchase, a game-bundle is included. You receive a Valve coupon.
The coupon is called the "Black Box" coupon. This new collaboration between ATI (now owned by AMD) and Valve will enable anyone buying a HD 2900 XT to download the forthcoming game bundle that will include Half-Life: Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal. The Black box will be brought to the retail chains later this year by Electronic Arts while the games will also be available via Valve's digital distribution system; better known as Steam.
This is really bang for your bucks guys, again all Radeon HD 2900 XT cards have this coupon bundled with them. For those interested we have a movie trailer of the blackbox available for download, click here (68MB).
With that being said, and before we dive into the actual technology and features, let me place all five products in an easy to read chart:
 |
 |
 |
|
|
ATI Radeon
HD 2400 |
ATI Radeon
HD 2600 |
ATI Radeon
HD 2900 |
| # of transitors |
180 million |
390 million |
700 million |
|
Stream Processing Units |
40 |
120 |
320 |
|
Clock speed |
525-700 MHz |
600-800 MHz |
742 MHz |
|
Memory Clock |
400-800 MHz |
400-1100 MHz |
828 MHz |
|
Memory bandwidth |
6.4-12.8 GB/sec |
12.8-35.2 GB/sec |
106 GB/sec |
|
Math processing rate (Multiply Add) |
42-56 GigaFLOPS |
144-192 GigaFLOPS |
475 GigaFLOPS |
|
Pixel processing rate |
4.2-5.6 Gigapixels/sec |
14.4-19.2 Gigapixels/sec |
47.5 Gigapixels/sec |
|
Triangle Processing rate |
262-350 Mtri/sec |
600-800 Mtri/sec |
742 Mtri/sec |
|
Texture Units |
4 |
8 |
16 |
|
Render back-ends |
4 |
4 |
16 |
|
Memory |
256MB GDDR3
128/256 DDR2 |
256Mb DDR2, GDDR3 GDDR4 |
512MB GDDR3 |
|
Memory interface |
64-bit |
128-bit |
512-bit |
|
Fabrication process |
65nm |
65nm |
80nm |
|
Power Consumption (peak) |
~25W |
~45W |
~215W | |
|
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|
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