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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Wednesday, 23 May 2007 |
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Page 1 of 13 After a long period of time since nVidia first presented the G80 chip, ATi strikes back with an answer. Yes, it's about the graphics card with the already-infamous chip codenamed R600. There were incredibly many predictions about it, but the greatest part of it turned out to be pure speculation. Although the card itself (bearing the name “AMD Radeon HD 2900XT”) was available to the press a long time ago, the NDA had lasted until May 14th, the day that was marked by a massive onslaught of people rushing to the few sites that had their reviews uploaded the same day. The issue became so serious that several sites actually had to revoke the reviews because of overcrowded servers, which crashed and failed due to the enormous number of visitors.
Our approach to the review of the new “line-up” is going to be focused on the novelties that the new cards present for the first time. When we say “line-up”, it means that AMD (ATi) decided to respect the tradition and presented the entire range of cards, from HD 2900XT down to HD 2400, thus presenting a solution for every budget. Still, it is necessary to have a glance at AMD's situation first. G80 was presented in November of 2006. It has been 7 months since then, which is a terribly long period in IT industry. It remains unclear why AMD allowed this to happen, but there were evidently some problems, as the story about the R600 chip was revealed a long time ago.
The fact that they are this late with the expected DirectX 10 accelerator could put them in an awkward position. If we refer to previous trends of launching new series of graphics cards approximately once every 12 months, and it has been nearly 2 years since the X1000 series, it is painfully clear that this might just be a dead end, as many a malignant would say. On the other hand, when rationally viewing the situation, it can be stated that no DirectX 10 games are available at all, with Vista only beginning to amass, which would mean that nVidia swept out too soon! Both sides have their pros and cons, and the verdict is up to you. Let's get down to business and have a peak at the novelties that AMD has for us this time.
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