AMD Releases Radeon HD Series

It well over six months late, but the HD series from AMD is finally here. The series consists of the HD 2400, HD 2600 and HD 2900 XT, which the top offering at the $399 USD price point. From todays press release:

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. This price enables more consumers than ever to enjoy the best in discrete graphics.

It’s no surprise that the web is chock full of reviews. HardOCP has performed extensive testing and makes a few important points in their conclusions:

In the above screenshot you will see the 3DMark06 score of 10723 on the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, 9105 on the GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB and 11191 on the GeForce 8800 GTX. Yes, the 3DMark06 score and “game tests” are a good deal higher with the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT compared to the GeForce 8800 GTS and is just shy of the GeForce 8800 GTX. If you were a benchmark enthusiast you might think wow, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT has to be faster in games because it is faster in 3DMark! By looking at 3DMark alone you would think it is almost as fast as a GeForce 8800 GTX. Well, you would be wrong.

Our friends at HotHardware had similar sentiments:

As we bring this article to a close, we’re sure many of you are left scratching your head and wondering what happened. Has ATI forgotten about enthusiasts now that they are part of AMD and don’t care about the high-end any longer? The answer to that question is, no. Even though you may hear different, we think ATI would have loved nothing more than to release a halo product that shines above all others. We just think they rolled the dice with R600 and built it on TSMC’s 80nm node hoping it would be able to hit higher clock speeds and have much more manageable power consumption. Unfortunately, that just didn’t happen.

I think that’s all that needs to be said. For those Linux users interested in how the new series will affect them, head on over to Phoronix for their perspective.