At long last, according to DailyTECH, we have benchmark results from a real AMD/ATi DirectX 10 product. Yesterday, on April 24th, 2007, the folks at the tech enthusiast site sat down with an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT board pitted against its closest competitor, the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB.
ATi only selected a few members of the press to actually be at the briefing, but DailyTECH is allowed to show the benchmarks due to the lack of an embargo. The results were in ATi's favor, as 1280x1024 benchmark results for Call of Duty 2, Company of Heroes, F.E.A.R., Half Life 2: Episode 1, Oblivion and 3DMark06 crowned ATi the winner for every single one.
ATi won the biggest in the Call of Duty 2 bechmarks, 73.5 FPS versus 56.7 FPS; and 3DMark06, with the ATi board showing 11447 3Dmarks to nVidia's 9836. These are just benchmarks though, and of course, it pays to be able to see the card in action with our own eyes.
The ATi board seems more robust in most fronts from an architectural point of view, sporting 320 stream processors versus nVidia's 96. (Note: "stream processors" might refer to the unified shader pipelines new to this generation of cards. With the old DirectX 9 cards, instead of stream processors we had fixed pixel- and shader-pipelines. As another exampe, the Playstation 3's graphics chip shares this older philosophy while the Xbox 360's graphics chip uses the unified shader architecture.) Its ram is also spec'ed to run on 512-bit channels in comparison to nVidia's 320-bit channels, but nVidia still slaps a higher volume of RAM on its board (640 MB versus 512MB).
Pricing? Actual release date? What about benchmarks of its flagship XTX board versus the nVidia GTX board? None of this has been released yet, but as May draws nearer, we can probably look forward to an increased flow of information in the coming days.
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