X-bit labs

Almost a Champion: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Gaming Performance Review (page 20)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 05/24/2007 | 03:39 PM ]

Conclusion

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB graphics cards left pretty ambiguous impression about itself. On the one hand, the graphics board is a good competitor for the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, but on the other hand its drivers deserve to be better.

The New Champ?

The new graphics card has been awaited for many months and a lot of observers expected R600 with 700 million of transistors and 512-bit memory bus to leave Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX in the dust. This does not happen and while the new Radeon HD 2900 XT can outperform the 8800 GTX model in certain cases, this board is really a competitor for Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.

Let’s summarize the cases when the novelty can actually beat Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS and when ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT fails to beat its competitors:

* - first place
** - second place
*** - third place
Equal amount of asterisk means draw.

As it can be seen, there are only a few cases when ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT can compete against the GeForce 8800 GTX (Battlefield 2142 , Far Cry , Splinter Cell: Double Agent , Command and Conquer 3 ). In 5 cases out of 19 our today’s hero either demonstrates unacceptably low results, or comes behind GeForce 8800 GTS. The latter never shows inappropriately low results, but in 7 cases out of 19 it comes third.

Unfortunately, ATI decided to load the code-named R600 GPU with only 16 texture filtering units and 16 render back ends, which limits performance in a number of games, which is sad, as the chip features 512-bit memory bus and can definitely offer exceptional performance with FSAA enabled.

AMD’s driver team also could act much better: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT has rendering issues with Half-Life 2: Episode One and performance problems with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and some other titles.