Overclock3D.Net :: Print Page :: Sapphire HD 2900 XT

The inside of the box is equally well packaged with a nice foam insert for the card to sit in. The package that comes with the card is nestled in it's own box below the card itself.

All is well on the packaging front then, although the box information could be a little less crowded.

Package

It has to be said that the package for the 2900 XT is very impressive indeed. You get:

* Getting started manual
* CyberLink PowerDirector 4
* CyberLink PowerDVD 6
* Furturemark's 3DMark06 Pro Edition
* Half Life 2 "The Black Box" Edition voucher
* Installation driver CD
* 1 x Crossfire Dongle
* 1 x S-Video to dual S-Video and dual Composite connectors
* 2 x DVI to VGA connectors
* 1 x DVI to HDMI connector
* 1 x S-Video to component connector

ATI and Sapphire have done very well in putting this package together, very well indeed. Everything you will need is there, along with a generous amount of decent media software, a couple of Half Life 2 related AAA titles and a very nice benchmark for when you want to show off your new card.

It's not often I say this, but that is a complete bundle and is impressive.

Specification

Taken from Sapphire's website:

Quick specs:

Chipset        HD 2900 XT

process (Die size)        0,08 µ
transistor count        720 Mio
memory options        512 MB
Core frequency        740
Memory frequency (eff.)        1650
Shader Processor Units        48
pixel shader pipelines        16
Geometry pipelines        8
Vertex shader        8
steam processors        320
Memory Bus (bit)        512
memory type        GDDR3
data bus        PCI Express x16
RAMDAC        2x400MHz
AA samples per fillrate (Gsamples/sec)
textures applied per pass
maximum texels filtered per Pixel (texel/pixel)


standard cooling        active
standard slot solution        dual
external power need        yes, 6pin, 8pin
DirectX        DX10 SM4.0
Memory Optimization        Hyper Z HD
Full Screen Anti-Aliasing        Smoothvision HD + Adaptive AA
HDR (10:10:10:2)        16-bit integer or floating point
Video acceleration        MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264
FullStream (Video-deblocking)        Real, divX, WM9,

HDTV compatibility (YPbPr)        yes
HDMI compliance / HDCP ready         HDMI 1.2 / yes
HDMI modes (over DVI)        480p, 720p, 1080i
Dual-Link capabilities        2
native display support        10-bit
3D Graphics Resolution        2560x1600
TV Out resolution        1024x768 1080i
Dual Display support        Hydravision 3

Full ATI marketing stuff:

700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process
512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller

* Fully distributed design with 1024-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
* Optimized for high performance HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering at high display resolutions

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

* 320 stream processing units
o Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
o Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
o Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
* 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
* Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
* Shader instruction and constant caches
* Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
* Up to 128 textures per pixel
* Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
* DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
* High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
* Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
* Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
* Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
* Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
* Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
* 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
* Physics processing support

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0

* Shader Model 4.0
* Geometry Shaders
* Stream Output
* Integer and Bitwise Operations
* Alpha to Coverage
* Constant Buffers
* State Objects
* Texture Arrays

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

* High performance vertex cache
* Programmable tessellation unit
* Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
* Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

Anti-aliasing features

* Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
* Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
* Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
* Temporal anti-aliasing
* Gamma correct
* Super AA (CrossFire™ configurations only)
* All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

Texture filtering features

* 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
* 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
* Bicubic filtering
* sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
* Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
* Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
* Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology

* Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
* Integrated compositing engine
* High performance dual channel interconnect

ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

* Two independent display controllers
o Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
o Full 30-bit display processing
o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
o Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
o Fast, glitch-free mode switching
o Hardware cursor
* Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
o Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
o Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
* Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
o Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363
* HDMI output support
o Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080i
o Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
* Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
o Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
o Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
o Underscan and overscan compensation
* HD decode for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats
o Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray™ playback
o Motion compensation and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation)
* HD video processing
o Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
o Edge enhancement
o Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
o Bad edit correction
o 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

1 Some custom resolutions require user configuration
2 HDCP support for playback of protected content requires connection to a HDCP capable display

Now let's get onto the good stuff...

The one major difference you will notice in the HD 2900 XT is that there is a heatsink wrapped around the rear of the card. Undoubtedly this is to cool the memory, power management chips and take heat away from the PCB. This is actually very effective and the 2900XT is certainly a lot less hot than it's 8800GTS/GTX rival.

The core itself is rotated around and has a shim fitted to it to keep the contact from cracking the core. It's an interesting layout and obviously implemented as ATI could not get the core in place as normal due to it's large size.

All around the card ATI and Sapphire have implemented really good retention mechanisms meaning that the card remains secure and straight, without the bending that we quite often see on GPU's due to their large weight.

Above is my main source of complaint with the 2900XT series of cards. The fact that the card needs an additional 2 pins on the standard 6 pin power dongle is pretty over the top in all honestly. nVidia's high-powered 8800 Ultra doesn't need this so why does the 2900 need it? I did not test the card with an 8 PIN power dongle in this test as I felt that there would be very few users at home who would have a PSU up to date enough to have 8 PIN PCI-e power.

Armed with two Dual Link, HDCP capable ports and ready for HDMI (with the supplied adaptor), the 2900XT really is a great for media-centric applications, even compared to it's well-endowed rival: the 8800 series.

Also in the pictures above is the copper fins from the cooler, of which we will take a look at in a sec.

The Cooler

The cooler on the HD2900XT is very effective in keeping this power-hungry GPU cool...but not so good at keeping it quiet.

The fan on the 2900 XT is very similar to that of the 8800GTS and GTX. However, unlike the pretty nice and quiet cooler on those cards, the fan on the 2900 seems to ramp up to a pretty loud whine which can be very irritating and off-putting. Certainly if you are thinking of putting the 2900 XT into a media centre then you would have to think of a different cooling solution or risk not hearing your movies!

Having said that, the cooler on the 2900XT is well designed with everything cooled that needs to be. There is a pretty chunky piece of copper contacting with the core and ATI seems to have used a decent amount of good quality thermal paste on the core itself. Reaching 45°C idle and 57°C loaded up with ATI Tool and RTHDRIBL (ambient 23°C), the cooler does it's job and those heatpipes are effective at removing the heat.

The HD2900XT does ok in our first benchmark against the two factory overclocked 8800's, but overall the average FPS is lower giving a slightly less enjoyable experience.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is a game based on an engine that uses many features of DirectX 9.0c. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects, with a slow-motion mode that really taxes today's top of the line GPU's. I fully patched version the game with the latest patch. I played three two-minute runs on a taxing part of the game with plenty of action, using slow-motion for the full time whilst firing at enemy soldiers and using grenades that produce a cool "blast" contortion effect when blown up.

Again in F.E.A.R. the HD2900XT does pretty well, just about beating the two 8800's in average FPS. However the frames dropped pretty low at a couple of points during gameplay, so it got a little jerky at points.

Oblivion

Oblivion is an awesome RPG with a simply huge immersive environment, great graphics and incredibly realistic scenery. This game is currently one of the most testing games that you can buy and it is certainly a test of the high-end cards here. I chose to do a run-through of the Arena part of the game. I spoke to a character, did some magic whilst in a fight and fought in the arena that is pretty huge. Also as well as doing this test I took a wander around to make sure that the benchmark resembled the general gameplay with each card. Settings used are below:

I enforced 4 x AA onto the game on all cards, leaving HDR on as an option in-game.

Here the ATI card excelled, pumping out the frames at a rate far superior to the nVidia cards. Oblivion was smooth and gorgeous to play as the HD2900XT really showed what it could do.