Product Listing

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB (R600)

By Vincent Chang - 14 May 2007

Test Setup

Test Setup

We kept to our usual high-end graphics test system for this first glimpse of the R600. This is a system configured with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor paired with an Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard. We added in two modules of 1GB DDR2-800 HyperX memory from Kingston, operating in dual channel mode before installing Windows XP Professional (with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c) on a Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive.

Since ATI has intended the Radeon HD 2900 XT to spearhead the company's assault on NVIDIA's domination of the enthusiast segment, we will naturally pit the newcomer against NVIDIA's existing top guns, the GeForce 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS 640MB edition. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra was left out as we felt that it would probably be too fast for the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Both NVIDIA cards were tested using the latest ForceWare 158.19 drivers. We also included ATI's own top dog from the Radeon X1000 series, the Radeon X1950 XTX as a reference to illustrate the performance gains made by the new series. This card was running on Catalyst 7.4. Meanwhile, the Radeon HD 2900 XT was tested with Catalyst 8.37 drivers from ATI and we expect there to be an official release of these Catalyst drivers to coincide with the product launch.

The following benchmarks were tested:

  • Futuremark 3DMark05 (ver. 120)
  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver. 102)
  • Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (ver 1.3)
  • F.E.A.R
  • Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
  • Quake 4 (ver 1.2)
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