Official HD 2900 Discussion Thread

[Shintai]

That Gibbo guy doesnt seem to match what everyone else gets.

[Baron]

That Gibbo guy doesnt seem to match what everyone else gets.

Yeah read this.

Hi there

That was my testing a month ago. So the ATI drivers were 8.36 and the NV drivers were whatever was the latest a month ago, now remember NV have greatly improved their drivers since.

Also I ask you guys not to rely on my in-game benchmarks as I was pretty clueless with what I was doing so would advice that nobody buys a card based on my game results because I was not 100% confident of all the settings.

I advice you guys to wait until some reliable results come out from places like Anandtech etc.

One thing for sure is that OcUK is I believe the only company in the UK right now with stock and pricing will be under £300 Including VAT and you can have one in your hands tomorrow if you order from OcUK around midday today.

What did impress me with the R600 is how overclockable it was but the fact the fan never span fast enough to be audible, even when overclocked and under extreme gaming conditions.

[Shintai]

The nVidia driver improvement is more or less BS.

And looking on Techreports noise graphs, he is full of BS with the fan too.

[Tim]

Yeah read this.

I just bought a 640mb GTS from Scan.co.uk, for £214 INC VAT! Match that Gibbo! £50 under the cheapest 2900XT on scan.

The nVidia driver improvement is more or less BS.

And looking on Techreports noise graphs, he is full of BS with the fan too.

It's gibbo, enough said!

[theteamaqua]

lol umm the only review i trust is vr zone .. shamino dont bs liek others do ...

[naokaji]

r600 has massive problems with drivers....

look at the results in games bouncing around like nuts....

you can pick a game, a resolution and a quality setting according to what result you want to get......


what am i talking about?
(all numbers taken from vr-zone)

in quake 4 at @1600x1200, ultra quality, 16x af + 16x aa

8800 GTX 54 fps,
2900 XT 52 fps,
8800 GTS 640 MB 37 fps,
8800 GTS 320 MB 36 fps,

in quake 4 at @1600x1200, ultra quality, 16x af

8800 GTX 108 fps,
8800 GTS 640 MB 104 fps,
8800 GTS 320 MB 104 fps,
2900 XT 98 fps....

and pretty much the same way it continues throughout all the games... and the same goes for most other reviews.....

you can make one card do the happy dance on the competitors corpse just by picking the right quality setting, game and resolution.....

[v_rr]

To those who waited for this card, my condolences.

Even I'm shocked by how bad this card really is.

Even in DX10(thank you guru3d) the 8800GTX wins.

I hope AMD doesn't lose too much due to this, as the R600 is now AMD's GeForceFX mistake.

One DX_10 game were at 1280 without filters the performance is arround 27Fps average looks like bullsheat.
Even in DX_9 the drivers of HD 2900 XT are very bad, so in DX_10 they should be worse.....

Bring some decent DX_10 games to say something about DX_10 performance......

There are many things we don't yet know about the GeForce 8800 and Radeon HD 2900 GPUs, not least of which is how they will perform in DirectX 10 games. I don't think our single DX10 benchmark with a pre-release game tell us much, so we'll probably just have to wait and see. Things could look very different six months from now, even if the chips themselves haven't changed.

[onethreehill]

@Bjorn3D
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1099&pageID=3433

[Noobie]

The nVidia driver improvement is more or less BS.

And looking on Techreports noise graphs, he is full of BS with the fan too.

Noise graphs do not tell you what HZ sound the fan is producing. The human ear perceives sound at a certain HZ (say X) as much worse that at other HZ (say Y), even if the dB meter says X and Y are of the same dB, a human will think X is louder Y.

You humans suck!

well in theory you could do a diff in motion by caputing all of the frames in BMP format and then going through and doing diff for every frame.

doing it by hand would take a year or so, but if there was some way to automate it, in theory it could be done. FYI though, it would require a seriously fast raid to do the capturing in lossless BMP

It is fairly straightforward to write this in software. It is likely that on the Internet sourcecode is available already. Only small parts would need changing.

Let's see....
I believe 3D Mark 2006 allows outputting sequences.
To prevent poor performance, a RAM disk is needed, but with the amount of RAM we have these days it shouldn't be much of a problem. 1 GB RAM-disk is easy now, so you can store at least 10 seconds worth of 30 FPS on it. Flushing large data to disk is straightforward too.
AutoIT can script the mouse/keyboard input, so the entire process can be repeated (although this can be done by hand).
The picture files need to be merged into a pure AVI.
Afterwards a VC-1 encoder should be used to create a crispy clear movie.

Actually the difficult part is transferring the files given the file sizes.

[lm358]

Wow Crossfire results are awesome (see Techreport)! ATI have done a good job there atleast -- scaling better than SLI.

[insurgent]

The nVidia driver improvement is more or less BS.

I just installed forceware 158.19 replacing 97.94 a few hours ago and I saw fps improvement in rthdribl. Max fps jumped from ~120 to 140 fps... I know it's not a game but I just shared an observation regarding driver improvements.

[Gorgul]

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/?article_id=601352

[Tim]

OOOOOUCH!!!!!!

[Shintai]

I just installed forceware 158.19 replacing 97.94 a few hours ago and I saw fps improvement in rthdribl. Max fps jumped from ~120 to 140 fps... I know it's not a game but I just shared an observation regarding driver improvements.

It was mainly just 3Dmark and only 3Dmark it improved.

[Tim]

And some more DX10

http://translate.google.com/translat...language_tools

[Shintai]

Damn that DX10 game looks nasty for x2900XT

So much for lower prices I guess.

[Syn.]

As said before, I had results from both the Catalyst 8.36 and Catalyst 8.37 Drivers. How did performance improve between this small driver jump of 0.01 version?



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!

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


I belive that this card will performe perfectly between GTS and GTX with at least the first retail drivers.

HardOCP review is more of a preview, they done tests on ES card. Hexus has much better results and they done it with HIS cards.

I said its a mixed bag of results and its cousing a hell of alot of confusion. From huge performance gains the card gets from small driver revisions and for such varying results in different games, the card is good, the driver is lacking. Dont get me wrong i am not saying new drivers will make it beat GTX i am just saying that currently all reviews you currently see can be subject to change with a simple driver update.

[onethreehill]

ASUS 2900XT Benching begins
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=144198

ASUS HD 2900XT: Overclocking
http://www.nordichardware.com/Reviews/?skrivelse=510

[Tim]

COH DX10 review.

Looks good.

http://translate.google.com/translat...language_tools

[dinos22]

it's not looking too crash hot hmmm

well maybe they will try to position it as more of a value offering then which is a win for end users considering all the expensive cards out there

[Tim]

Firingsquad.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...mance_preview/

[deathman20]

Well most are putting it right between the GTS and GTX. If they used the beta drivers for the 8.38 surely the 2900XT would have better results in those tests. Only time will tell and we'll see what ATI can pull out of better drivers.

[Tim]

Well most are putting it right between the GTS and GTX. If they used the beta drivers for the 8.38 surely the 2900XT would have better results in those tests. Only time will tell and we'll see what ATI can pull out of better drivers.

True, but this is a lot of negative press, and many people looking for which card they want is going to draw their conclusions on these reviews. They don't necessarily know that drivers will improve performance. Not everyone is tech savvy, most are just gamers.

[Metroid]

Well is kind funny, many people are comparing 2900XT X 8800GTX. This is just not right. The price tag explains all.

[Tim]

Well is kind funny, many people are comparing 2900XT X 8800GTX. This is just not right. The price tag explains all.

Maybe not, but the card is the flagship and says everything about the company, flagships allways do battle with each other. Always have been like that.

So you can't blaim people really, even ATI initially designed it to compete with the GTX, but just failed.