As usual, you rock when it comes to detailed & balanced video card reviews.

(If you threw in some CPU scaling it'd be perfect, but I'm aware of the hours that would require - I'll just continue hoping you'll do a specific CPU/GPU scaling article one day :P )

The review is flawed. What are the version of drivers used for testing? The ATI card gets a serious performance boost with latest drivers.

Also, who is going to use Aniso 16x + 4x FSAA with a mainstream card?

Did the reviewer know that without FSAA and a balanced Aniso setting the ATI card performs faster than the Nvidia one.

Keep in mind that this are mainstream cards, not performance.

Most lame review ever made for a midrange card......

the benchmarks are always with 4*AA and 16*AF
IT IS A MIDRANGE CARD!!!!
Lame as*es,too lazy to bench without AA
+ using a s*cky beta driver for ATI

way to go Xbitlabs......

Forceware 158.22? lololol let the 158.22 die ok?

Read my lips : M-O-V-E T-O 160 S-E-R-I-E-S

What's with the reviews these days? It seems like almost every reviewer is writing in the worst possible way regarding AMD/ATI products. I mean come on..

1. Why making ALL the tests with AA+AF to a maximum - It's a MIDRANGE customer card! Most of these guys won't even run with more than 1024x768 res anyway!

2. Even with the review as it is, the conclusion is completely distorted. Nvidia won 8, AMD-ATI won 6, not including 3DMark and 5 or 6 tied results. On what basis are you sentesing the RADEON to "multimedia applications" use only??

3. That 8-6 with is as close as 7-7. Did you use the latest drivers? You may have gotten an opposite 8-6. Furthermore, you probably have gotten even higer in favor of ATI if you made a non AA+AF comparison as well.

For the record, i'm no fan of either company and i will always take what ever suits my pocket in the best way, but a review with so many holes in it just makes you wonder... where is the objectiveness?

I think the first 5 post say it all.

Who test main stream cards with these settings 4*AA and 16*AF

they are far from usable on any of these cards. What was the point of this article?

If it was to show which one of these cards is first to tank at these settings then you hit it right on. If it was to show actual playable settings in these games you failed!

Alexey, Yaroslav and Anton,

Thanks once again for this review. As you have recently demonstrated, the HD 2600 series of graphics cards offer other features besides those related to gaming – hopefully decent HD/BD decoding without requiring megawatts of power burn and the fan noise necessary to prevent a forest fire. I may be your only reader interested in these other features, but I really appreciate your work in measuring the power consumed by the GPU and graphics memory. As far as I know, this is the first public attempt at making an independent measurement of the actual power burn of these cards; and as far as I am concerned, it’s commendable. Probably like a few others, I hope that these decoding functions will be moved out of the GPU and into north bridges soon. But, in the meanwhile I’m trying to conjure up a lower power system that will do HD/BD proud, say fewer than 125 Watts, total.

Are all Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 cards long? Are all the passively cooled ones long?

One other thing, I had forgotten that Nvidia’s 8600 GTS didn’t require the additional power connector.

Where did you lay your hands on a several watt current sense resistor small enough to stick in the motherboard? How about some photos of your test setup?

Thanks again,

Orville

Oh wow, I like all the whining.


Why do they use AA and AF while benchmarking? Because they are testing the very potential of the graphics card. If you can run AA with decent frames on an nvidia card, then good for you why not. But the fact is that AA sucks the life out of the ATi cards and thats poor design and a negative that should be mentioned in every detailed unbiased review.

Driver optimizations only get you so far, this generation of ATI cards are simply an embarrassment.

As a random question, without any trepidation to go too far - was DST/hardware shadow mapping enabled or disabled during the 3DMark runs? I've overclocked my GeForce 8600 GT (680/1486/800 respectively, as in core, shader, and memory clock) and have received results that either surpass the GTS's by a tad, come very close, or are tantamount at the same settings (1280x1024, 4x FSAA, 16x AF, high-quality AF, and transparency multisampling), so... changing tones there. I'm just curious.

That the 2600 XT is so close to the 8800 GTS in those SM3.0 3DMark06 tests is quite... stupefying. Yet the tension builds intrigue as to how it will perform in future, next-gen 3D apps in comparison.

Excellent review Xbit! It's great to see someone is actually testing the product thoroughly, most just throw in a few games, a 3d mark and it's done. As for the card itself... well, it's kind of meh. As you guys said, the lack of ROPs and TMUs is detrimental to overall performance.

Deja vu... yet another slanted review on x-bit.. a dip in the usually excellent standard of journalism.. and negative feedback which was obviously ignored. Who the hell uses 16x ansio? Why use such unrealistic settings, and then claim the card is no good for when it actually would be with reasonable settings?

This is misinformation to readers??

Is this just a snobby elitist reviewing biased towards the mainstream?

I have always liked your reviews, they are quite complete and I like you do power measurements that way but it is not realistic to test these cards at 1600*1200 or 1920*1440 with 4xFSAA enabled.

It is supposed to be a review to help decide wich card to choose but I still dont know which one to buy because with 4xFSAA no one is playable.

May be the problem with the driver is that had no time to do the review with the newest. It could be a good opportunity to update the article with the newest drivers and without 4xFSAA.

Good overall review. Yes its a maintream card. Yes the DX10 performance is slow (as with all current gpus). Why test with 4xAA 16xAF settings. Why not? Its a good measure of their performance. This card is good to game at 1280x1024 res. So getting HQ performance numbers will get you an idea of how it will perform withouth AA and AF. People that make both NV and AMD/ATI earn the big bucks game avg at 1024x768... So yes today mainstream videocards are not breathtaking, but they for $125~$150 price range cards they give good performance. And for people who just bough a new system, getting a 8600/HD2600 if you are a casual gamer is not that bad.

This are mainstream cards and no one expects to play games with 4x antialiasing and aniso 16x. This card seems really good for the price, compared to the mainstream cards we've had before.

ATI should rework that bus to get more pump work from all of those transistors off of the PCIe bus.

This puts a standard of game play from most of the titles on the low side. For something wich in the new world of Directx10 mainstream.

Certainly with the new process ATI incorporated that engine should be able to get the throttle adjusted.

Not certain but believe it is simply choking what could be a good platform.

very bad card for gaming, you see the 2600XT doing quite good in 3dmark but its all driver optimazing, in real games it performs really crap. I love my 1950 !

Hello,

Thanks for all the feedback provided: it will be considered when we start to make future reviews.

Due to the fact that ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is a mainstream product that is to stay on the market for a considerable amount of time, we felt that we needed to post a conclusion covering all possible aspects of its usage model. Hence, we had to check all the aspects of its performance before making our final judgment. Due to this, we first published reviews covering media playback and DirectX 10 performance of the RV630 graphics processor and only then released the whole review.

Given that it took us quite some time to create three reviews and due to some other factors, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT review came out later than we would like it to arrive. Nevertheless, we fully believe that our conclusions are totally correct and the review will serve as a guidance for graphics cards’ evaluation for quite some time.

Regarding the Drivers

Due to the out-of-date driver version, we received complaints regarding the outdated benchmark numbers of ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT. From what we have found during benchmarking the graphics card for future reviews, only Half-Life 2, Company of Heroes and Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars have more or less substantial performance increases with the newer drivers. We have reflected that on our performance diagrams. However, this does not dramatically change our conclusion regarding the product (we also added a table to the conclusion for better reference).

Regarding Test Settings

Since the vast majority of today’s games use realistic lighting, detailed textures and high-quality special effects, we do not know why would anyone decrease texture filtering quality to add rather ugly artifacts that were common a decade ago, but cannot be accepted now. We also do not usually decrease image quality settings in games as different settings affect performance of various GPUs differently. Hence, for correct comparison we have to keep the highest possible settings all the time.

Full-scene antialiasing dramatically improves image quality. Given that in the last two years we tested a number of performance-mainstream graphics cards with 256-bit memory bus (ATI Radeon X800 GT, X800 GTO, X1800 GTO, X1900 GT, X1950 Pro, Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS, 7900 GS) and decent performance with FSAA 4x, we have no idea why we have to step back to no-FSAA mode ahead of the ATI RV670 and Nvidia G8M launch, both of which are projected to feature 256-bit memory bus. Moreover, enabling FSAA does not affect relative performance of different products, e.g. if the GeForce 8600 GTS is generally faster than the Radeon HD 2600 XT, then it will remain faster with FSAA activated.

Hey thanks. This really explains a lot to me.

You said about the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 "the developers from the former ATI Technologies created an inexpensive mainstream 65nm GPU that can work at 800MHz and has a serious computing capability, but this was done by means of cutting down the texture and raster processors of the chip. I wonder, if I am not so concerned about gaming, but rather 1920 X 1080p video, would this be a good card for me? I don't think I need the texture and raster processing for Blu-Ray HD video as compared to gaming. On another note, I am planning on using the 3-D feature of my DLP HDTV. According to Samsung the TV goes into a 120 Hz mode for this 3-D viewing. They say I need a card with 1920 X 1080 res. @ 120 Hz. Do you think this is true? I have heard the frame rate of the TV does not directly equate to the refresh rate of the graphics card. I would think they would. Do you know if this card could output 1920 X 1080 res. @ 120 Hz?