It has been quite some time since we reviewed a new ATi/AMD product here at Legion Hardware and with their latest generation of graphics cards being no less than 9 months late, it is no secret to why we have been unable to review their products. AMD has had a lot of issues to work through over the past several months and this is primarily why the R600 has been so late. The AMD acquisition of ATi created even more problems and the fact that they were developing a product that featured more transistors than any CPU (Central Processing Unit) in existence did not help either.

Needless to say it has been a rough road for AMD and their R600 architecture, and everything and anything that could create a problem has. Nevertheless after much delay the new Radeon HD series has been released on the 14th of May and ten new graphics cards have been named. Today we have the Radeon HD 2900XT which is of course based on the R600 core using an 80nm design process. This version features just 512MB of onboard GDDR3 memory clocked at 1656MHz using a 512-bit wide memory bus. Combined with a core clock of 757MHz, the Radeon HD 2900XT can produce a memory bandwidth of 102.4GB/s, which is greater than that of the GeForce 8800 GTX.

In fact on paper the Radeon HD 2900XT looks to be a more impressive product than the GeForce 8800 GTX. The GeForce 8800 GTX brought a shift in GPU functionality and capability, moving away from the traditional pixel and vertex shaders we had got familiar with, to a collection of floating point processors also called Stream Processor Units (SPUs). The 8800 GTX version featured 128 SPUs clocked at 1.35GHz. Then we have TAUs (Texture Address Units) of which the 8800 GTX features 32, along with 24 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units).

The Radeon HD 2900XT on the other hand features a staggering 320 SPUs, while there are 32 TAUs and just 16 ROPs. However in light of the Radeon HD 2900XT graphics card, Nvidia cunningly prepared a new product designed to stand up against this new Radeon. Known as the GeForce 8800 Ultra, this new “overclocked” GTX features a 6% greater core clock, bringing the frequency up from 575MHz to 612MHz. Furthermore the memory frequency has been boosted by 11% as the memory frequency has been increased from 1.35GHz to 1.50GHz, which effectively pushed the memory bandwidth figure to 103.7GB/s creating a 20% rise in bandwidth.

Interestingly the Radeon HD 2900XT is said to go on sale at just $400 US, making it significantly cheaper than the Ultra and even cheaper than the GTX. So after all is said and done, is the Radeon HD 2900XT targeting the 8800 GTX/Ultra or the 8800 GTS? Considering two Radeon HD 2900XT graphics cards can be purchased for a single GeForce 8800 Ultra, this new Radeon must be pretty amazing value. However, this all depends on how the Radeon HD 2900XT stacks up against the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics cards. Today we will be comparing the Radeon HD 2900XT with the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB and 640MB graphics cards.