Introduction

Some months after the acquisition of Ati by Amd, and after some months of inexplicable retards, Amd has finally released the first graphic cards of HD 2900 family based on the R600 gpu.

The accumulate retard has permitted to the rival Nvidia to take up all the market areas with his cards based on G80 and G84 chips, named 8800/8600 and compatible with the new DirectX10. The causes that made Amd release the R600 project with a retard of about 4-6 months from the first announces made after the fusion with Ati caused a lot of hypothesis and rumors, some saying that the R600 project was ready and completed from December 2006, but some marketing reasons (for example the launch of products with integrated graphic, like the 690 chipset), had convinced the chipmaker to release it only now. There are already voices of R650 and R700 in the next months.

The characteristics of Radeon HD 2900 XT are interesting, related to its price. If you were waiting for an extremely high-end product that could overcome the performances of Nvidia 8800 GTX (or Ultra), you will be deluded. If we consider the launch price (that we will see after) the direct concurrent of ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is the Nvidia 8800 GTS with 640 MB.
Let's analyze now the technical features of the first graphic card by AMD/ATI.