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ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Vista Performance
Introduction
Hardware like video cards, especially high-end video cards, often fall under the purview of the Enthusiast. An enthusiast is a computing hobbyist with a kind of hardware pioneer's mindset. Never quite satisfied with where he or she is, enthusiasts tweak and modify, often risking and sometimes obliterating good hardware in attempts to find its limits. But there's often one territory that enthusiasts avoid: new operating systems. This makes sense when you think of an operating system as the set of tools used to trailblaze hardware. How would you go digging when your shovel has a hole through it? Vista's been muddy ground for enthusiasts, not so much because of hardware or software compatibility (which yes, has been a problem for some), but more so because it's just failed to be as good as XP when it comes to gaming. This, by all accounts, is a matter of experience. Windows XP has been around so long that even though it's theoretically possible to squeeze more performance out of Vista, the opposite has really been true since Vista's release; people know how to code for XP that much better. ATI has obviously decided to target the mainstream, which is quickly going to depend on how well their hardware runs on Vista, and XP benchmarking will, sooner rather than later, go the way of 3DMark. ATI's current flagship, the HD 2900 XT, runs about the same as NVIDIAs 8800GTS 640MB on computers using Windows XP. But that's patently irrelevant for Vista users. Here are the numbers from a side-to-side comparison: the pioneers of operating systems read on.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: About the HD 2900 XT, the Card, and the Bundle Page 3: Test Setup Page 4: Testing - HL2 Episode 1 Page 5: Testing - F.E.A.R. Page 6: Testing - Company of Heroes Page 7: Testing - Prey Page 8: Performance Summary Page 9: Conclusion 
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Add Comment
3 User Comments 1 - Posted by
Anony
on June 2, 2007 - 10:51 pm Just a heads up that you might not know but the HD 2900XT does not actually feature any HD hardware acceleration at all. Check up on http://www.techreport.com for the verified word from ATI themselves. Apparently only the lower end versions have it, much like nVidia's situation.
2 - Posted by
Kurtis
on June 2, 2007 - 11:29 pm Yup, we posted news about that, linking to Tech Report as a matter of fact. :) http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/11599/Radeon+HD+... Thanks for the heads up, in any event. :) 3 - Posted by
Max Slowik
on June 3, 2007 - 11:25 am You're right though, I word that awkwardly, and probably shouldn't say in the conclusion that it has hardware Avivo (which what it doesn't have is HD Avivo). On the other hand, it still uses Avivo, and the video playback quality is far and away better than on the 8800GTS 640, specifically SD playback. I can't vouch for HD content because I don't have HD media yet.
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