ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT - R600 Has Arrived
Take a look at the red-head standing over there. If you’re a regular reader here at HotHardware, you know exactly who she is. That’s ATI’s adventurous and oh-so-curvaceous front-woman, Ruby. And she’s holding that ‘Perfect 10’ sign for a very good reason. It’s probably not the reason you’re thinking of, however. For a digital personality, she’s definitely pretty darn hot; maybe not a 10 in our book, but pretty darn close nonetheless. No, she’s holding that sign not as proclamation of her hotness, but rather to give you all a hint as to what ATI has in store for the PC in the coming days, weeks, and months.
Today is the day many PC enthusiasts have been waiting for. And we say this with some hard data to reference. In January we ran a poll and nearly 40% of over 4,000 respondents said they were waiting to see ATI’s next-gen R600 architecture before passing judgment on the already-released GeForce 8 Series. Despite the arrival of a clearly more powerful and significantly more feature-rich GPU architecture, an almost equal number of you decided to wait to see ATI’s hand before betting on NVIDIA’s G80. Today, we can finally tell you what ATI’s been working on for the past few years and that ‘Perfect 10’ sign reveals part of the story.
ATI has chosen today, May 14, 2007 – my second wedding anniversary, incidentally – to reveal a line-up of 10 desktop and mobile GPUs, all derived from their R600 architecture. The line-up consists of sub-$100 entry level graphics cards to a $399 high-end part that’s designed to do battle with NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800 GTS. What about taking on the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra, you ask? Well, the new, AMD-owned ATI is moving in a somewhat different direction now, and at least currently, they don’t plan to produce a low-volume, ultra-high performing part that only a fraction of the enthusiast crowd can afford. We know, some of you are crestfallen right now; we were too at first. But don’t sweat it. The arrival of the R600 and its derivatives is a very good thing. We’ll try to better explain on the pages ahead. For now, here are the specification of ATI’s new flagship graphics card, officially named the Radeon HD 2900 XT.
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