Official HD 2900 Discussion Thread

[triple_A]

Drivers drivers drivers
Do you seriously think DAAMIT would come up with a card that can do no better than this?
That would be a REAAALY depressing story.

Anyways, I'll wait before i conclude whether 2900xt is worth its price or not till ati/amd comes up with some proper drivers, because the one's that are beeing used now are badly optimized if at all..

Even if it was like X1800 was compared to X1900 it would perform better than this..

[v_rr]

G80 brutally wipes the floor with R600 in DX10 Lost planet - Extreme condition:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/505/1/

Ya a game developed to Nvidia cards and with ATI runing with serial bugs because they don´t had the chance to work with the editor of the game.
So is more than fanboy talk, talk about that.

Why they didn´t run the game on 8600/8500/8300?????

Also when 95% of the Nvidia selling produts is 8600/8500/8300 that will run that DX_10 game in a slide-show at 640*480 then people will realise that it´s time to get back to X1950pro and 7900Gs that are far better in DX_9 and costs 50$ less.

Those cards will run DX_10 as good an FX5200 runs DX_9.
That bench only show how 95% of Nvidia selling grafic cards just suck in DX_9 relatively to 7900 as X1950pro, and suck so much in DX_10 that even a highly optimized Nvidia game will run that game very ssssslllllloooowwwwww.

[Noobie]

Does the HD2900XT GPU have dual-core/quad-core enhanced drivers like NVIDIA has?

[Soulburner]

No 6xAA on the 2900...now that's very disappointing.

That's one of my top 3 reasons why I came to like ATI cards better for gaming.

[Noobie]

No 6xAA on the 2900...now that's very disappointing.

That's one of my top 3 reasons why I came to like ATI cards better for gaming.

I've had this discussion before. Last time I was stupid enough to talk. Now I present you with pics. Download http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/...ize-images.zip from http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2988&p=14

Pay no regards to the stupid name schema.

ATI R600 has 2 6xAA filters: 6xAA Narrow & 6xAA Wide. I find that 6xAA Narrow is better than 6xAA Wide. I also find that 6xAA Narrow is better (a little bit) than 6xAA x1950. I also find G80 has no 6xAA.

Filename:
R600 - 6xAA Narrow - n.6x.r600.jpg
R600 - 6xAA Wide - w.6x.r600.jpg
X1950 - 6xAA - 6xAA.x1950.jpg

I still managed to talk to much

[WrigleyVillain]

ATI R600 has 2 6xAA filters: 6xAA Narrow & 6xAA Wide.

Thanks for "talking too much" again. I, like others apparently, was under the impression it was 2x/4x/8x. Why this confusion?

[cadaveca]

Because 6x is not MSAA, it's "narrow CFAA" +4xMSAA, or "wide CFAA" +2xMSAA. The end result does not have the same quality, although it's quite close.

[Soulburner]

That's good news then.

Though it makes for a lot of choices, it can be quite confusing...most people will want to know what is the best? I like 6x because its a great quality setting without having to go to 8x and lose more performance. This also makes it impossible to directly compare to Nvidia at that setting.

[cadaveca]

Infernal LOOKS better on 2900xt than X1950 Crossfire...dunno about performance, although it felt smoother.

[Dynasty]

[gunit]

somone run the lost planet demo in game bench pls with the 2900.

[XeRo]

For those interested in reading more reviews, x-bit posted a brief review.

http://xbitlabs.com/articles/video/d...hitecture.html

EDIT:

When we first tested Nvidia GeForce 8800 graphics card several months ago, we noticed that the launch ForceWare driver had issues with fog in Half-Life 2. Well, today we have an unpleasant surprise: the new ATI Catalyst driver has the same issue.

Anyone able to confirm this?

[MaxxxRacer]

It is interesting to note that there are multiple versions of the card. some with the fets at the rear, some without. others have no markings on the die, but rather on the shim, and some with both markings on the die and shim.

[Tim]

Finally Bi-tech's review

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...n_hd_2900_xt/1

[gunit]

this sites review also shows the 2900 to sit right in between the GTX and GTS:

http://www.hardware.info/

[Daveb2012]

I just wish it wasn't so power hungry, and that ATI made their version of the card instead of all the other MFG's.

[Noobie]

Because 6x is not MSAA, it's "narrow CFAA" +4xMSAA, or "wide CFAA" +2xMSAA. The end result does not have the same quality, although it's quite close.

To me the quality of narrow CFAA + 4xMSAA looks better than x1950's 6x AA (as I previously stated). The wide CFAA + 2xMSAA is worse in comparison tough.

As for it being really 6x or not, 4xMSAA + narrow CFAA (X) takes 6 samples to calculate the AA with, x1950 does the same. R600 with X uses 4 box-samples and 2 non-box samples. x1950 takes 6 box-samples. Both have advantages and disadvantages. We just need to see it in motion in some games to determine what is better.

[Sumanji]

The chips is pretty complex, and it will take some time making it work the right way. I personally wouldn't call the R600 a GPU, it is a chip that can do graphics Can't wait to see what else it can do, and how fast.

QFT.

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the delay was AMD pushing the design to be more stream-computing friendly (even at the expense of GPU performance).

[Richie P]

this sites review also shows the 2900 to sit right in between the GTX and GTS:

http://www.hardware.info/

No mention of what driver's were used...but heck - those results look very different to other reviews...New driver maybe?

Not quite sute what to make of it. They didn't seem to look at the power consumption at all :/

With a price between 350 and 400 US$ the card is just as expensive as nVidia's 8800 GTS 640MB. In our benchmarks the card performs around 20% better than the nVidia card so the ATI's price/performance ratio is better.

When we purely look at the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB versus the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, the ATI is definitely the better choice. The lower priced 320MB version however could tip the balance to nVidia, and the fact that ATI has no answer to the 8800 GTX let alone the 8800 Ultra is a shame, to say the least.

'Bout the first site to fully support the card...

[mascaras]

: got mine 10 minuts ago


temps idle (52c)








more testes later


regards

[STaRGaZeR]

Test it for us mascaras, hurry up!

[gunit]

seems to be a beast in unreal 3 engine. and before u ask, this site is NOT biased. some of their other benches show the 2900 losing to the GTS, so they are not biased.




http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/3...0-xt/page1.php


another thing everyone should notice is that the AA issue is not universal, so that should provide reason to the optimist that the hardware is not broken but it is a just a driver issue. in the above review the 2900 takes a 50% hit in Tomb Raider with 4xaa, but in R6 vegas only about 10%.

[GLENBOY]

: got mine 10 minuts ago


temps idle (52c)








more testes later


regards

you've defended these cards right from the start with good reason i think here is my own 3dmark03 score with 2 x hd2900xt in crossfire with a qx6700 at 3600mhz and the cards at default stock clocks

[Noobie]

seems to be a beast in unreal 3 engine. and before u ask, this site is NOT biased. some of their other benches show the 2900 losing to the GTS, so they are not biased.




http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/3...0-xt/page1.php


another thing everyone should notice is that the AA issue is not universal, so that should provide reason to the optimist that the hardware is not broken but it is a just a driver issue. in the above review the 2900 takes a 50% hit in Tomb Raider with 4xaa, but in R6 vegas only about 10%.

Everyone should notice that there is a less than 1 FPs drop in 2560x1900 when enabling 16xAF and 4xAA on the 2900. Everyone should remember that G80 had problems to get AA working on Vegas. Everyone should remember that TechReport (whilst using driver version 8.37.4.070419a-046506E) says that "the (Vegas) game engine doesn't seem to work well with multisampled antialiasing, so we didn't enable AA". Everyone should remember that MatBe uses driver version 8.37.4.2_47322. Everyone should remember that some reviews show that the 2900XT comes very near (sometimes under, sometimes above) of 8800GTX. Everyone should remember that some reviews show that the 2900XT performs way better than the 8800GTX in low res in Vegas.

I wish everybody would start to do HD video reviews of the benchmarks they run

[OBR]

Go to hell with stupid 3D mark benchmarks ... Yes ATi has good score, but in games is totally crappy ... and in quality of picture .... looser ...

PS. dont flame anything about ummatured drivers ... it is not true, ummature is design of chip not drivers ...