ATI R600 Reviews Starting to Appear

[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.