The ATI Radeon 5XXX Thread

[Wesker]

So, when the 5870 is going to be demonstrated in public?

If the only purpose of having 2900XT was running 3D Mark, than it was priced competitively. Seriously, Radeon 2000 were garbage.

It was a flop, not only because of the hype, but also because it arrived so late.

IIRC, it was very competitive with the 8800 GTS (>=) without MSAA. Once you enabled MSAA, however, it got a little murky (<=). This wasn't helped by the terrible drivers at launch time (Again, IIRC, there were times when R580+ managed to outperform R600). I believe several key ATI employees came out saying that they wished drivers were in a much better shape for launch (one of which was Sir Eric Demers, a lead chip architect at ATI).

Massively oversized, a very leaky 80nm process, no hardware based MSAA resolve, premature drivers and a shortage of texture throughput was R600's undoing, IMO.

But the $399 price tag, included Black Box bundle and native sound over HDMI interface kept it from becoming a complete disaster.

EDIT: Changed Orange Box to Black Box.