ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX, Doomed from the Start

News Posted 26/04/07
Author: PV5150
Source: DailyTech


ATI logo

As a continuation of what was posted yesterday regarding ATI’s financial woes ; along comes another story which may well be another nail in the coffin. According to the source article, AMD’s flagship GPU – HD 2900 XTX has received a thorough caning at the hands of Nvidia’s 8800 GTX. So considerable was the defeat, that there may be a very strong possibility that the HD 2900 XTX may never see the light of day.

Up until at least March of 2007, the spearhead of the ATI Radeon HD 2900-family is the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX. This model is the big daddy of AMD’s DirectX 10 lineup, poised to take on NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTX and upcoming 8800 Ultra.

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX video cards feature 1GB of GDDR4 video memory, besting the GeForce 8800 GTX’s 768MB of GDDR3 video memory. GPU manufacturers often wait to set the exact clock frequencies of bins until just weeks before launch. Our Radeon HD 2900 XTX sample was released to board partners in the second week of April, features memory clocked at 2.02 GHz and a core clock of 750 MHz.

Physically, the Radeon HD 2900 XTX core is identical to the Radeon HD 2900 XT core. Both feature 320 stream processors, but the XTX differs by bringing GDDR4 to the package.

The HD 2900 XTX is initially aimed at OEM’s and system integrators but considering the less than stellar performance; additional memory cost and the large footprint…adoption is looking extremely dubious.

The numbers below further reinforce AMD’s dilemma:

Performance chart

HD 2900 XTX

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