Considering how little people care about the quarter-chip comparison, I do see a lot of chit-chat about it. lol! I don't care about it really, and I definitely didn't care enough to go the trouble of typing about it. Until now.

Looks like we're back to the old days, where ATI offered better image quality and nVidia offered better perf. BUT here it looks like ATI's got the upper hand with drivers, from the little I've read, at least.

I still have to fix my good ol' Athlon 2100+/9700 Pro/512MB/160GB system. FIX that one. Not spend $400 on a graphix card for a new box.

I'm a poor med student. But I do love my old computer. It trucked on, day and night, for 4 years. Not gonna give up on her yet.

It's pretty cool how the benchmarks were split up while explaining parts of the processor, kudos.

I don't like the whole tent filter thing. This is just like the bluring that games like Vegas make over use of. Instead of properly detailing things, they just blur over the top of it so you can't tell what looks good and what doesn't.

I guess if you set further back you can't tell either way, but when you're trying to pay attention to details and it looks like you need glasses it's a bit too much.

IMO and just about everyone I've talked to IRL, bluring is the abomination of the gaming industry. It should've never come around, it should never been around, it should just die out.

Not to be mean, but maybe in 20 years I won't care if I'm staring at a oil painting as long as the jaggies are gone either. Right now though, I rather have jaggies then a blurry screen.

BLURING MAKES ME ANGRY!

These results do look dismal, but I too think that in six months things will change a lot. Hopefully it won't be optmizations that make me ANGRY.

If you're ever looking for a good scene to test the texture filtering. Start up a game of CS:S. I noticed something odd the other day when I was playing. Certain CS:S servers have deathbeams. When you die they point at the person that kills you. 99.9% of the time when you look at it without it running paralled, the texture bluring becomes VERY aparent. As in one end looks like a line and the other looks like a straw that was flatened out.

Company of Heroes also showed signs of this. If you look at a big change in the terrain, IE the side of a mountain that isn't uniform, you should be able to see a distinct change in filtering between something that looks farther away then it really is and something that looks closer. The algorithem messes up and part of the mountain is blurry and the other part is very clean and precise.

to the person who said 640MB Ultra... it's 768MB. the geforce 6800gt had
all 16 pipes but ran at a lower speed than ultra and had a slightly less
robust cooler than that card. you can find referenced clocked 8800gts 640MB for around 350 usd and right now it seems a certain major e-tailer
is selling HD2900XT for a little more than MSRP of 400usd but you get the
coupon for the valve bundle of hl2 ep2 , Portal and Team Fortress 2 as well
as a logitech G5 laser mouse thrown in free in most cases and with reason-
able shipping. they have similar performance and some might argue that
HD2900XT has better image quality overall, but the 8800GTS 640MB can
generally be overclocked quite well. were coming down to familiar choices
at this price point.

What's the deal with putting a US quarter next to the die? you do realize that lots of foreigners read you site (see your own poll and server stats) and we don't get in contact with US quarters much do we..
Why don't you find something else that we all know, like a USB connector for instance, all computer users know the size of that, something that's a bit more universal might be more appropriate.
Ironically you do list the die size in millimeter, is that the idea? quarter for the "dumb americans" and actual metric size for the rest? :P
Just wondering.

I dont know how to describe this card other than it being a BIG disappointment...
you have the paper specification of a flagship card equalling or beating 8800 gtx...
but it turns out that the performance is of the 8800gts level... but with the much bigger power consumption and heat.. and loud and distracting fan noise.. that you *might* consider tolerating if it has the performance of GTX or better... but it hasnt

i have heard quite a few who says it is good for its price... i gotta say that it is priced this way because of its subpar performance.. and AMD is not being generous... AMD has no choice .. if AMD has a choice, it would have preferred to price it like gtx and thats what its original performance target and price range it aim for... AMD must suffer horribly on the profit margin on this card

I think some ATI fanboys just curled up and died today..

(I'm not a nvidia fanboy.. I just laugh at brand fanboys in general)

#78, 2900XT has 320 stream processors and it operates at 742MHz. 8800GTX has 128 stream processors but it operates at 1.35GHz !!!!

2900XT has only 16 Render Output Pipelines and only 16 Texture mapping units

8800GTX has 24 Render Output Pipelines and 32 Texture mapping units

So, no R600 is not ahead of its time, not at all !!!

The performance variation based on driver versions is quite fascinating it seems:

http://www.computerbase.de/news/treiber/grafikkarten/ati/2007/mai/a...

Some of that was mentioned in this analysis, explaining how this architecture is more dependent on drivers than usual:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070514-amd-launches-the-hd-2...

The problem is r600 will need the same driver tweaks the nv 5000 series needed and that cant be good for amd and it sucks for you when the next gen comes out and they stop tweaking.

Amd it cant be seen as ok that this thing requires 1.65 ghz ram 512 bit at that and so much power just to be nearly competative...

Amd what the heck does amd do next? They cant dieshrink after this cycle as they will be at 65 already so.. whats the refresh? Nvidia will have monster 65 nm chips.. and amd?

I dont know what happened to ATI after the R300 days but this is inexcusable. Come on, Red Team

Heh anyone else notice how they missed thier 750 mhz min clockthey were shooing for for months now?

Good grief the guy that criticizes the use of the quarter gets all the replies... we're to easy to bait around here.

Ah, I see, you were referring to the underlying technology and not the card itself. A die shrink is usually beneficial; it won't, however, do anything to help cards that have already been created.

Anyway, the point is that better drivers may help, but to say "definitely" - especially in the context of the rest of your previous post - would be hyperbolic.

As I said way back ati simply didnt expect anything remoyely like what the 8800 is. Even after all this time they cant make thier design do enough even using much better 80 nm lith and much highr ram and heat budgets.

They just didnt plan for it to have to go this fast.

I'm a bit disappointed by this card, but I'm very curious about DX10 performance. With all the forward looking design decisions, it could jump ahead with more efficient processing of those titles. I keep my cards around for a long time (currently using a 9800pro which replaced a still active 8500) and I expect my next one to play DX10 games for the next 3 years at least.

I'm most disappointed in the power useage and noise. I think that future drivers will get the kinks out of the performance (see improved BF2142 and Oblivion results with alpha driver), and the image quality seems really good. But can the noise/power be fixed by drivers - I doubt it. I wonder if this card will run OK with the built-in 450W power supply that comes with the Antec Sonata II case.

But, I don't understand all the hate in these comments. The performance is not too bad considering that no one has been optimizing their games for it yet. In most of the games, it BEATS the GTS 320/640 (Stalker, Supreme Commander, HalfLife2, Oblivion, Vegas) even the OC'd versions and sometimes approaches the GTX. The card also does really well on F.E.A.R., company of heros, and Prey (OpenGL!! able to equal nVidia 8800GTX in Doom3 engine!! that's a real first for ATI) always beating the 8800GTS's in the ExtremeTech review. And you should be able to get another 10-15% OC with it.

And the CrossFire configuration has definitely come a long way since it was first introduced. In most situations it shows better efficiencies than the 8800GTS SLI. And don't forget the coupon for HL2 episode 2 which is worth $40 (since I would be buying that anyway).

It's too bad about the power and noise. I'm in the mood to replace my 5-year-old system (Athlon 1900+) within the next month or so and am very interested in these new cards. I'm going to give it a bit more time and see how the prices settle out. I like the idea of getting better performance than a 8800GTS (can't afford a GTX), but the price will have to be right to make up for the heat/noise/power issues.

EDiT: i missed mentioning that it beats the GTX in Call of Duty 2 at 1920x1200, with and without AA/AF high quality - ExtremeTech review.

Scott, Can we see an update or addition with a Sacagawea dollar?

Driver revision is upto 8.37.4.3 and there are significant performance gains with this revision. Maybe a second look next month with catalyst 7.5 is warranted.

I'm getting the impression that the key to performance with this card will be refining the drivers, which as of yet are holding it back vs. the more mature 8800 series. Looking at the results between the first release and new alpha drivers where they were tested in the review, there's obviously more power in this card left to tap.

Heroes delivers more than the R600.

Dam $399.....I am so glad I dont game on a PC anymore. Good article though.

The quality of drivers is more important to me than raw performance when it comes to video cards. As long as the card is reasonably fast and can run everything I want as well as I want, that's really all I care about.

Underwhelming. I expected more from AMDTI.

At least them thar 8000GTS are still lookin sexy, and that 8800GTX ought to be getting a minor price drop soonish.... I hope.

Why was the testing done under Vistax64 with 4gb?

We might be using that in 2 or 3 years but right now most of us are sticking with XP? :/

I wonder if they now drop driver updates for anything before the r600, like nvidia did after releasing their dx10 card.

Well, I'm glad that ATi finally has _something_ to answer nVidia's 8x00 series.
On the other hand, compare the HD 2900 XT to the 8800 GTS 640MB (non-OC'ed) and the ATi card starts to look pretty bad -- higher power consumption (and greater heat, no doubt), louder fan, and equal or worse performance for the same amount of money, and only 6 or 12 months late to boot! Wow! :P
I guess it's a good choice if you're _really_ into HD.

Also, I noticed a lot of posts about using a quarter for size comparison. People actually care about that? Really? Wow, I have really overestimated people as a whole.
It does seem rather obvious to just use a ruler instead of a quarter, though. Then again, that'd probably start an argument about British vs. Metric units...

well, at least the card is not extremely expensive like NV's Ultra cards, but it is very very inefficient. With the amount of resources this company has, they should have made an effort to reduce power and noise (like the Powercolor X1950 Pro style passive cooling). Very nice and complete review, though. Performance wise, it is running neck and neck with the current GF, so its really a step back, considering that you can get a 8800GTS for about $260 on newegg. Lastly, I'd swear that I can smell the stench of shader model 5.0 around the corner, so I'm gonna hold off on this one.

AMD is ahead of their time. This is probably their biggest problem. Remember the X1600XT? (And perhaps dubiously, the 9600XT vs 5900XT)? For the past few years, they've consistently sacrificed performance in current applications for (presumably) future ones. The trouble is that people want to play their games now, and by the time the future catches up with AMD, Nvidia tends to release something which thrashes them in the present again, while AMD responds with something designed for workloads even further into the future.

It would be sort of interesting to give the 9600XT and 5900XT, X1600XT and whatever its intended competitor was, a rematch with more modern games, but this would be more of a historical curiosity than actually relevant.

(Note that it's perfectly awesome to be ahead of your time, if you're also ahead in the present. See R300, NV40. The bad idea is to sacrifice current performance for future potential.)

pardon me if i missed it...i wasn't intent on reading ALL 145 posts, or every single word of that article. I have no direct experience with vista and amd or nvidia's vista drivers, but i have read an awful lot of negative issues with nvidia's vista offerings. Anyways, an intangible i think might not be reflected in the interview is amd's vista drivers. To me, the performance parameters are close enough...give or take here or there. If the drivers are that much better, then hey, that tips the scales for me.

And although i do agree with another poster's comment that they've had 6 months to mature their drivers, i think it's reasonable to assume that they're still relatively young and have some hidden potential to tap into yet.

No review of the onboard audio? How come? Doesn't this card have HDMI audio?

#123 - Ah you're probably right. I can't wait for the followup.