ATi has been hard at work on their R600 line of GPUs for a number of months.  So long at work in fact that many people have wondered if they were asleep at the wheel.  Today is the day we see if ATi is driving down the right road or not with the release of the HD2900XT.  It seems odd to me that after so much speculation and wait, ATi is kicking their newest product line off with the XT model.  The 'XT' is typically just under the XTX unit which is reserved for ATi's premier graphics processor.  I would think that the initial release would be more fitting to go off with a roar and thunder.  Not that the HD2900XT is a slouch just that right out of the gate it admittedly seems to not be the end all be all ATi card.  The HD designation is exactly what you think it is, High Definition, telling you that ATi is looking at HTPC and other high def applications for use with its newest R600 GPU.

The people at Hightech Information System have set us up with one of their HD2900XT Radeons to get a feel for how the successor to the X1900XT/1950XT unit gets the job done.  Hitting the street today at a $400 price point, the HD2900XT moves the bar up with what appears to directly challenge the GeForce 8800GTS card from NVidia. 

Specifications

• Graphics Engine: ATi Radeon HD2900XT (R600)

• Interface: PCI-Express

• Engine Clock: 743MHz

• Memory Clock: 828MHz

• Memory Type/Size: GDDR3/512MB

• Memory Interface: 512-bit

• Pixel Pipelines: 320 Stream Processing Units (unified)

• Vertex Engines:  320 Stream Processing Units (unified)

• Max Resolution: 2560x1600

• VGA Output: Yes with adapter

• TV-Out: HDTV/S-Video/Composite Out

• VIVO: Yes (Advanced Video In Video Out)

• DVI: two ports

• Native Crossfire support

What you get

HIS has a history of throwing in nice extras with their products and the HD2900XT is no different.  In addition to the card, HIS includes a variety of cables and adapters to take advantage of this 'high definition' ready card to include a DVI to HDMI adapter, a HDTV adapter, VIVO adapter and two DVI to VGA adapters.  In addition to this we have a driver CD and a certificate with a product key code for Half Life 2: The Black Box, Portal and Team Fortress 2 via Steam's download engine.

We also found the HIS Bonus DVD with lots of demos as well as full versions of Power Director 5 SE, Power2Go and Dungeon Siege.  The last item in the box can only be attributed to the marketing people at AMD/ATi.  It is a promo piece that comes across like it's off of a cereal box and says in the same way "collect all three limited edition stickers in specially marked boxes of AMD processors, motherboards and ATi Radeon graphics cards."  I got the 'Play' sticker...  Did AMD/ATi steal a marketer from Post?

NEXT

Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - The Card / Test Bed
Pg 4 - NFS: Carbon / NFS: MW
Pg 5 - Quake 4 / STALKER
Pg 6 - Image Quality / Conclusion