ATI R600 Reviews Starting to Appear

[Lemur]

Looks like ATI is showing finished silicon to some reviewers. Nice, big, exhaustive review posted this morning on THG.

FTA:

There are some really nice advances incorporated into the HD 2900XT and the Vista performance of the 1GB GDDR4 cards have made it the choice of boutique system builders (I just wish we had them in house). At $400 for the version we have in the lab, it is a good price as it has more to offer than the GeForce 8800GTS. The sweet spot is still the 320 MB version of the 8800 GTS but that could change as other versions of the R600 family emerge. Until then, if you were sitting on the fence, you can either keep riding or finally spend you money on something.

Overall, HD2900XT is more forward looking than GeForce 8800 and it should be; it took an extra six months getting it to market. If you are leaning towards longevity of a card, R600 looks more attractive with a dedicated tessellator, programmable filters, high-clock speeds and crazy amounts of bandwidth. It is a hot and a little loud.

[edit]

Anandtech has posted their review as well.

What a long, strange journey it has been to this point. We have a very delayed launch from AMD that features a part that consumes quite a bit of power and doesn't compete with the competition's high end offering. At face value, this sounds quite a bit like NVIDIA's NV30 launch, but thankfully we wouldn't go so far as to call this NV30 Part 2: the R600 Story.

Even though AMD has not built a high end part, they have built a part that runs very consistently at its performance target (which could not be said about NV30). AMD is also not trying to pass this card off as something it's not: rather than price this card out of its class, the R600 will find a good home at a reasonable price.

Despite the delays, despite the quirks, and despite the lack of performance leadership, AMD has built a good part. It might not be as exciting as an ultra high end card, and it certainly isn't as power efficient as an 8800 GTX or Ultra, but it has quite a few positives that make it an interesting product, and more competition is always a good thing. The worst thing that could happen now is for NVIDIA to get as complacent as ATI did after R300 wiped the floor with the competition.

[Whacker]

Unfortunately, these cards don't appear to be very impressive. They can give the 8800 GTS cards a run for the money performance and price-wise (for the most part), but that appears to be it. The 8800 GTX seems to blow these away. Heat seems to be a VERY big problem with these cards as well, and they are relatively power hungry.

Kinda sad really, I've been looking for a good excuse to go with ATI next round, looks like I'm destined to remain an Nvidia guy 4 lyfe. We'll have to see if the upcoming die shrink, driver maturity, etc can help iron out the kinks. This all does seem to be in line with what else I've read, in that ATI/AMD has essentially 'written off' the R600 and are going full steam towards their integrated cpu/gpu/gpgpu/whatevertheheckitscalled architecture.

[edyzmedieval]

Phew, thank God the 8800GTX still blows.

[Spino]

This is obviously not the smoothest of launches. The good news is the 2900XT beats or matches its target cards (8800 GTS series) and seems to be more adept at maintaining higher minimum framerates, a fact which might intimate that there is plenty of room for improvement via driver optimization and/or a increased clockspeeds. However the inconsistencies with the 2900XT's performance indicate poor driver optimization. AMD/ATI needs to work furiously on improving its drivers for this card and release them ASAP.

Above all AMD/ATI desperately needs to move the high end 2900 cards from the .80nm process to a .65nm process ASAP. This will provide much more head room regarding clock speeds and will dramatically lower power requirements. The 2900XT overclocks surprisingly well for a .80nm part so the move to .65nm should give the 2900XTX or 2950XT (or whatever AMD/ATI is going to call their top performing part) the edge over Nvidia's 8800 GTX & Ultra cards. However given that the 8800 cards are already made using a .90nm process and Nvidia has yet to move the 88xx line to .65nm the race is just getting interesting.

The one clear advantage the X29xx cards have over Nvidia is their superlative handling of HD video and audio. Then again this should come as no surprise since ATI cards have always been better for multimedia purposes.

Being late to the game has hurt AMD/ATI more than anything else. Nvidia has had 6 months or so to reclaim any high end market share it may have lost over the last two quarters.

edited - I made a mistake re: Nvidia's manufacturing process. Corrected for errors.

[Lemur]

Ars Technica's take on the launch.

At any rate, using a runtime component to dynamically divide up a workload among a highly parallel architecture that runs at a lower clockspeed (the R600 approach) sounds a lot harder to me than writing directly to a narrower but faster architecture (the G80 approach). I think that this is why the HD 2000 series hasn't dethroned the G80 at the very top of the graphics heap, but it hasn't even tried. The highest-end card announced today is the $399 ATI Radeon 2900 XT, a part that falls well below NVIDIA's top-of-the-line card in both price and performance. The 2900 XT isn't reaching its peak potential with its current software stack, so throwing more GDDR3 and more clockspeed at it for a boutique $1,000 card wouldn't buy it enough performance to stand up to the high-end G80.

At least, that's my current theory.

[DukeofSerbia]

People, don't forget ONE important thing - drivers! Those Catalyst drivers are probably bugged as always happened in history of ATI. After 2-3 months those new cards will show full potential.

PLUS, there is no DX10 games, so we don't know how new GeForce and Radeon perform. Both are paper tigers for now.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Looks like I may have to do some re thinking

The Radeon HD 2900XT has been called a lot of things over the past few days and to be honest we were expecting a complete dud, but it just isn’t! Yes the Radeon HD 2900XT is not as powerful as we were expecting, the drivers probably are not as polished as they would be and the card runs hot as hell but... for $400 US this product is quite good value. While we found the performance to be a bit up and down, there was one thing that remained fairly constant and that was the Radeon HD 2900XT’s lead over the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards.

There are just three big problems we had with the Radeon HD 2900XT, one of which can be solved, the other to a certain extent and the biggest problem we will have to live with. The biggest problem being of course power consumption, the Radeon HD 2900XT really needs a lot of power to get the job done! In fact the card is rated for 215 watts, while we believe it can use up to 250 watts of power alone. This is significantly more than the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards and even more than the GTX version.

Its only $85 more than my 8800GTS320. Plus my MoBo is sli ready. I may need a new power supply however I think Ill wait a few months and see what happens.

It whoops the 8800GTS640 in every test but 1

[Whacker]

Looks like I may have to do some re thinking



Its only $85 more than my 8800GTS320. Plus my MoBo is sli ready. I may need a new power supply however I think Ill wait a few months and see what happens.

It whoops the 8800GTS640 in every test but 1

And I submit this to the contrary: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...50aHVzaWFzdA==

Hardocp has been consistently fair, so I generally take their word on the results they give. Just take it with a grain of salt.

[Husar]

PLUS, there is no DX10 games, so we don't know how new GeForce and Radeon perform. Both are paper tigers for now.

Well, there is this.
Not a game yet, but a demo, and it crashed before there was anything after I clicked the shortcut, probably because I have only a 7950GT.

[Gawain of Orkeny]

Probably wont work for me either as I dont have Vista LOL. I wont even try.

[hoom]

What primarily matters to me is performance in RTW/M2TW, has anyone seen any benchmarks?