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
