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ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB
Introduction
It has been six months and one week since NVIDIA launched their highly acclaimed 8-series of DirectX 10 video cards. ATI is more than a little late, but then again, why rush? Yes, many people have been rewarded for jumping on NVIDIA's graphics, but with Vista's slow adoption and a complete void where DirectX 10 games should be, there's been little to gain besides frame rates... NVIDIA has gained a lot of ground over the past six months, and has successfully hard-launched a whole set of mid-range cards and two flagships--ground broken by ATI. ATI and Microsoft jointly developed Xenos, unified shaders and all, so if ATI doesn't show up NVIDIA it will be fairly shaming. It's true that today ATI is not releasing an 8800GTX-killer. Not even a competitor. At the Tunis, Tunisia event, the closest thing mentioned to an ATI-alternative to NVIDIA's monster video card was, in fact, two HD 2900 XTs. The HD 2900 XT is a direct competitor to the 8800GTS 640MB, and that is precisely what we have on the bench today. This is an apples-to-apples strict performance comparison between the two high-end cards. We will follow up with an image quality article, but ATI needs to win on numbers now, not details. If the HD 2900 XT is merely an alternative to the 8800GTS 640MB then ATI will be humbled. And athough ATI has done some impressive engineering with clever, unique, and flexible architecture, that doesn't mean jack if the performance simply isn't there. After half a year of delays, the HD 2900 XT needs to be ahead of the competition, not beside it. Our results are a little surprising. All things being equal, and drivers set to default, the HD 2900 XT shows a different side to us.  
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: About the HD 2900 XT, the Card, and the Bundle Page 3: Test Setup Page 4: Testing - Half-Life 2 Episode 1 Page 5: Testing - F.E.A.R. Page 6: Testing - Company of Heroes Page 7: Testing - Prey Page 8: Testing - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Page 9: Testing - 3DMark '06 Page 10: Performance Summary and Overclocking Page 11: Conclusion 
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