Conclusions
The gaming performance numbers bear out the wisdom of AMD's decision to introduce the Radeon HD 2600 XT at $149 and to adjust everything below it downward accordingly. The 2600 XT GDDR4 model we tested performs competitively against the XFX GeForce 8600 GT 620M, but even in that company, it tends to stumble with antialiasing enabled. As for the two lower end cards, much depends on how AMD and Nvidia choose to position their products in the crowded portion of the market below $100. Right now, Nvidia's GeForce 8500 GT looks to be bracketed in both price and performance by the Radeon HD 2600 Pro and Radeon HD 2400 XT. I'd call that a qualified win for the 2600 Pro, since stepping up to its $89-99 price only makes sense to me. If you're spending less than that on graphics, you're getting the sort of performance you deserve, regardless of which brand of GPU you pick.

Beyond that, the new Radeon HD cards have some clear advantages in other departments, especially those features that fit under the Avivo HD umbrella. These GPUs' native support for dual-link DVI ports with embedded HDCP crypto keys takes the guesswork out of connecting them to almost any sort of display you might choose. We found out about the perils of navigating these waters first-hand when we discovered none of our GeForce 8500 GT or 8600 GT cards support HDCP—and thus won't play back HD movies over DVI. Radeon HD owners shouldn't have to confront such surprises. The new Radeons' support for HDMI with audio makes them nicely suited for home theater PCs, too.

Once you get those HD movies playing on your display of choice, the Radeon HD 2400 and 2600 offer the best overall combination of CPU offloading, power efficiency, and image quality available. The GeForce 8500/8600 chips' inability to fully accelerate VC-1 decoding isn't a big disadvantage in terms of additional CPU load or power consumption, but their poor scores in the HD HQV test raise concerns about image quality—as does, well, their image quality itself. In addition, the current state of post-processing in Nvidia's pre-release drivers raises questions about whether cards like the GeForce 8600 GT will ever be up to the task of playing back HD movies with the sort of high-quality noise reduction the Radeon HD cards offer.

That may be little consolation for those who were hoping to see a killer DirectX 10-ready gaming card from AMD for around $200, a true replacement for the Radeon X1950 Pro. The X1950 Pro stands out as an excellent value still, but it's growing increasingly difficult to recommend a DX9 card as a new purchase with the GeForce 8600 GTS in the mix. DX10 games are beginning to arrive, and eventually one or more of them will make that DX9 card feel old. Here's the shame of it: the Radeon HD 2600 XT GPU packs about 100 million more transistors than the GeForce 8600 GTS, is built on a longer card with a larger cooler, and has more theoretical memory bandwidth and shader power. Yet it can't keep pace with the 8600 GT all of the time, let alone the GTS, in current games. AMD's aggressive pricing may make the 2600 XT a successful product and a reasonable choice for consumers, but it doesn't entirely erase the sense of unrealized potential.