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ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
- cnet editors' rating 7.7/10 Very good Editorial policies >>
The good: Trades performance wins with Nvidia's comparable GeForce card; tessellation engine could help noticeably differentiate ATI's image quality; built-in audio chip sends audio directly out the HDMI adapter to streamline home-theater PC setups.
The bad: Not a definitive winner on today's games, and next-gen performance is too early to call; Nvidia's competing card costs $50 less; hot, power-hungry, and noisy card not well-suited for smaller home-theater PCs.
The bottom line: We still need the next-gen games to arrive (and mature driver software) before we can crown a 3D graphics card winner. For now, we can say that ATI's card has some benefit to home theater enthusiasts, but delays may have hurt this card's value, regardless of how the performance shakes out.
Specs: Graphics Processor / Vendor: ATI Radeon HD 2900XT; Video Memory Installed: 512 MB; Compatibility: PC See full specs >>
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More than six months after Nvidia released its Windows Vista-oriented 3D graphics cards, we finally get to see what the competition looks like. AMD's new 512MB ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is a $399 3D card designed to compete with Nvidia's 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS, an Editors' Choice-winning product from last November. Like Nvidia, AMD considered not only gaming performance, but also HD video processing in its new cards' design. The Radeon HD 2900 XT's 3D performance, while strong, doesn't separate itself enough to earn our whole-hearted endorsement, at least today. And while we're tempted to recommend it as a streamlined graphics solution for home theater PCs, we have a feeling AMD's forthcoming midrange ATI cards might be the better bet.
ATI and Nvidia running neck and neck
From a bullet-point perspective, the Radeon HD 2900 XT offers core features similar to those of the GeForce 8800 GTS. Both cards feature support for the next-generation DirectX 10 gaming graphics exclusive to Windows Vista. Like Nvidia's dual graphics-card mode, called SLI, the Radeon also offers its own Crossfire mode, which in this release no longer requires a more expensive "Master" card to double up cards. You can simply pair any two of the same Radeon 2000-series cards now. Like Nvidia's SLI, this new generation of ATI cards also relies on a pair of internal connectors, eliminating the cumbersome "Y" cable required by the Radeon 1000-series.
Also similar to the GeForce 8800 GTS, the Radeon HD 2900 XT mirrors the Nvidia card's unified architecture, dubbed "stream processing" by AMD. What that means is rather than separating the card's processing pipelines into different static amounts for each type of calculation, the Radeon HD 2900 XT now calculates pixels, vertices, and geometry with a pool of 320 dynamically allocated processing threads. In other words, if your scene needs more pixel calculations than it does vertex math, the card can adjust the number of pipes dedicated to each type of task as the workload demands. That makes this new generation of cards from both vendors more flexible, and gives game developers more leeway, knowing that all of the DirectX 10 PC gaming hardware can process more complex or more detailed scenes than they've been able to in the past.
For graphics techniques, both cards support anti-aliasing and high dynamic range lighting simultaneously, and the Radeon HD 2900 XT finally catches up to Nvidia by offering 8x anti-aliasing. Previous Radeon cards could only do up to 6x. The ATI card also comes with a passel of new anti-aliasing modes, under the larger umbrella of custom-filter anti-aliasing, or CFAA. This is a direct response to Nvidia's CSAA (coverage sampling antialiasing). Both modes use various techniques for smoothing edges and making a 3D image look more polished, and in general we find that we can't tell the difference, short of poring over small screenshot details and running benchmarks to specifically isolate one mode or the other. If you're that interested in these kinds of specifics, plenty of enthusiast Web sites have the information you're looking for.
Tesselation could be the differentiating factor
For the most part, then, the Radeon HD 2900 XT and the GeForce 8000-series have comparable features, but as they have in the past, the ATI cards have a secret weapon that might give it an edge, pending game developer adoption. A so-called programmable tessellation unit claims to give the games the appearance of an increased level of detail. Nvidia has no comparable feature. ATI has tried this type of dedicated image quality feature in the past with little success, but it might have an advantage this time around given that this tessellation capability is also present in the Xbox 360's ATI graphics chip. As the development environment for the Xbox and Windows is very similar, it might not be too hard for Xbox 360 games that make their way to the PC to benefit from the tessellation engine as well.
No conclusive performance winner
For its specific speeds and feeds, the Radeon HD 2900 XT comes with 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM. Rumors of DDR4 memory coming out from ATI are not unfounded, as you'll find it on the midrange Radeon HD 2600 XT card, to be released in June. For now, it's plain old DDR3 on the Radeon HD 2900 XT, in this case with a 512-bit memory interface. The core clock speed comes in at 740MHz, with the memory at 1,650MHz.
How all of that translates into performance is a developing story. As usual, we have our colleague Sarju Shah over at Gamespot to thank for putting this card through its paces, but even more so than normal since he tested with both Windows Vista and Windows XP. The results were a tie. In single-card mode, the Radeon HD 2900 XT outpaced the 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS on Quake 4 and Company of Heroes, but it fell behind its Nvidia competition on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the new shooter Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. Doubled up, the ATI card only came out on top in Company of Heroes in Windows Vista, and in Quake 4 in Windows XP.
Those scattershot rankings make it a challenge to determine a clear winner between the Radeon and GeForce cards based on pure performance. Recent price cuts bolster Nvidia's position, as its 640MB GeForce 8800 GTS now comes in around $350 or so from various online retailers. But even that shouldn't be the final word on performance. As late as three days prior to launch, AMD sent an alpha version of its next driver that it claims will significantly boost antialiasing performance. Nvidia also released a new public beta driver of its own last week. We wouldn't normally let the continual stream of driver updates sway us from making a performance determination in a review, but the PC gaming situation is more complicated than that given the forthcoming release of DirectX 10 games.
Both ATI and Nvidia have pointed us to demo versions of games (Call of Juarez and Lost Planet, respectively) that will have DirectX 10 modes for us to try out. We won't be using either demo to publish official benchmarks, as each reeks of vendor-specific benefits. We're more anxious to try out the full shipping version of each game, as well as the forthcoming Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, both of which feature DirectX 10. Once those and other next-gen games hit, we'll be more able to make a more concrete determination of which vendor is better prepared for the next generation of PC gaming.
Putting the "HD" in Radeon HD 2900 XT
If the Radeon HD 2000 cards have any clear advantage over Nvidia today, it's how they integrate into a home theater PC. Notice that we're not specifying the Radeon HD 2900 XT in this regard. Like the Radeon 2400 and the 2600, the 2900 has support for HD video decoding, and thanks to all of those cards' onboard audio processors, they can route an audio signal from your PC through a specialized HDMI adapter, without requiring you to connect any other internal cables. Nvidia's cards can't do that. We hold back on recommending the Radeon HD 2900 XT for this purpose, because of its size and its power consumption. As a double-wide card, it's not the most home theater PC-friendly. You also have to consider its power consumption.
AMD recommends a 550-watt power supply for a single Radeon HD 2900 XT, and a proportionally more reasonable 750-watt PSU for two of them. That 550-watt requirement, though, is a large power supply for a single graphics card. Further, this card runs hot, as evidenced by the hot air blowing out of the back of it. The exhaust is so warm it feels like it could roast a marshmallow. It's also loud. Large power supplies, lots of heat, and irritating noise levels are exactly the kinds of characteristics you don't want in a home theater PC. You might be more forgiving of those issues in a traditional desktop, but we'd look to one of the midrange ATI cards, available in June, for your home theater PC needs. Without a standalone HD optical drive we can't test the HD video quality of the Radeon 2000 series, but stay tuned, because we're actively angling for an HD drive-equipped desktop with this card in it.
Windows Vista Tests
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Windows XP Tests
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ATI test bed: 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800; Intel 975X chipset motherboard; 2GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 160GB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drive; Catalyst driver version 7.4, and Catalyst beta driver version 8-37-4-070419a
Nvidia test bed:: 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800; Nforce i680SLI chipset motherboard; 2GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 160GB Seagate 7,200rpm hard drive; Nvidia ForceWare driver version 158.22 and ForceWare beta driver version 158.42
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9/10
Spectacular
August 17, 2007
"Fast, and cheap DX10 card" Read more >>
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9/10
Spectacular
May 30, 2007
"Need more DX10 game to truely compare" Read more >>
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by maldelus - August 02, 2007
9600 XT vs 9800 Pro 2 comments
by Prime0925 - June 03, 2004
by morgana47 - June 08, 2008
What is the difference? 1 comment
by stujim - February 07, 2005
how did i answer my own question? 1 comment
by spear_a_lobster - October 27, 2007
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