Description After a delay of about half a year, AMD's DirectX 10 Lineup is finally out.
Available immediately, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is expected to be priced at an incredible USD $399 (SEP) including Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two from Valve.
Rounding out the family are the ATI Radeon HD 2600 and ATI Radeon HD 2400 series, bringing feature-rich DirectX 10 gaming and smooth multimedia playback to customers looking for entry-level and mid-range graphics options. The ATI Radeon HD 2600 and ATI Radeon HD 2400 cards is scheduled to ship in late June with pricing to be announced.
Several Hardware sites have rushed to test the latest and strongest of AMD's offerings, the HD 2900 XT, and concluded that ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT performed slightly better than Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS, but consumed more power and produced more noise (from its large fan). However, Radeon HD 2900 XT's lag behind the GeForce 8800 GTX is justified by the $150+ price difference.
ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT features : 700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process 512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface Ring Bus Memory Controller Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture 320 stream processing units 128-bit floating point precision for all operations Command processor for reduced CPU overhead Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle Up to 128 textures per pixel High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192) 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support Physics processing support Full support for Microsoft DirectX 10.0 Shader Model 4.0 Geometry Shaders Dynamic Geometry Acceleration Programmable tessellation unit Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering CrossFire Multi-GPU Technology ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform Two independent display controllers High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs, each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content HDMI output support Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution Integrated Xilleon HDTV encoder provides high quality analog TV output (component / S-video / composite) Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions Underscan and overscan compensation HD decode for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-Ray playback HD video processing Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing De-blocking and noise reduction filtering Edge enhancement Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction) Bad edit correction High fidelity gamma correction, color correction, color space conversion, and scaling MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time VGA mode support on all display outputs PCI Express x16 bus interface OpenGL 2.0 support
