There has to be some truth to this... "the 2900s almost triple the performance of the 8800 system at 2560x1600 in Company of Heroes, with PC Mag bods quoting 84 FPS for the 2900s and 32 FPS for the SLI rig"

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=40770

I am not technical enough to know the exact reason that the HD2900Xt's scale so well, memory bandwidth, double bandwidth of the xfire bridge, better drivers for vista etc, but it's good

It's good to see the tables being turned on the Nvidia team, a more balanced market is what we all need.. But the HD2900XT are going to show some real future potential, as Vista and super high res displays are the future.

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Have you seen annands lately? They have a story on it also. All true

From the first word and benches on the 2900 DailyTech http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7864 Take it for what its worth, as Ive already seen some of these a month ago. Didnt say anything then, as Im sure no right thinking fan would believe me.

So now I guess we must wait looonger, again waiting for decent saviour drivers for the GTX. Sheeeeeesh. OK, Im loving this. No drivers can save the GTX. Must be crap

That looks extremely promising, looks like they got the drivers working properly.

Here are the full results, somewhat limited.


This is something that needs to be looked into further. These benches are very limited but they do a good job of exploiting Nvidia's Achilles heal; namely Vista SLI drivers. It may turn out that for the multi gpu crowd that the 1 gig xt's xfired are the top choice. If you notice in the gif I linked to they were still calling those cards xtx's.

Also, if you look, on that chart, the cpu is actually running slower on the ATI rig. I dont think nVidia can make good drivers , and theres no hope for them at the very top of the top , Theyve had their cards out for how long? And how long have everyone waited? And they cant take the crown? As if newer drivers could help... OK, Im being sarcastic here. The GTX is a fine card, as is the 2900, just tired of all those fanbois, now heres a lil sumpin for them too. People just have to understand, this is all new territory, DX10, Vista et al. Theres going to be problems. Ive read a interview that the head designer at ATI believes the AA and AF problems can be solved with drivers. But can the SLI be solved for the GTX? heheh

The ATI drivers department has always been on top.
They have done a pretty decent job concerning xrossfire vista drivers.

I believe that 2900XT's in general have even greater potential that will be revealed in future driver versions.

ATI seems to be gaining right now on the high end.
8)

ati does bad. the product sucks. when nvidia does bad. they say its the drivers.

One reason can be that 2900 is ROPS bottlenecked and Nvid shader botlenecked. When there are 2 2900's there are enough ROPS in DX10 environment...
But, yeah most propably it's driver problem.

This is great news if it is correct.

ATI / AMD need some good news badly and this will likely push volume sales of the mid range cards too.

Obviously the fanbois here will go wild with some stupid comments to amuse the level headed.

I'm still steering clear of this part until they bring in a cooler 65nm replacement though.

All we need now is some similar news on Barcelona ...

A nice level playing field again will keep the prices down ... that equates to cheaper and speedier FPS gaming.

If AMD could knock Intel off their pedistal (a big ask) we could all afford quads too !!

It's about time AMD did something right. Now maybe nvidia will get goosed into fixing their sucky drivers. I'm tired of being limited to a hundred fps in dx9 games.

More links:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2147064,00.asp

You say the perform better under Vista, but what about xp? I'm not a Vista user nor will I ever be so does anyone have any benchies for the two in xp?

Those are actually good news (if true) because now Nvidia will put more effort in improving his Vista drivers, and we could finally switch.

OK, heres a tip. XP is DX9 based, not DX10. The drivers for SLI in XP run fine. Theyre old drivers, easy to do, lotsa history. Plus , the hardware is DX9 capable, but its also DX10 capable, and thats where it starts getting tougher. And youre never going to buy a new game? Or use DX10? I will, but not for awhile tho. I hate Vista at this point also

ATi really has to gain some ground in the high end market, though this looks promising.

While it does look good for ATI at first look then I went over the benchmarks. These arent the HD2900XT's. The benchmark linked from PC Mag states HD2900XTX's. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2147064,00.asp

That said ATI may well have a monster GPU on the way. The differance between the HD2900XT and the HD2900XTX is 80nm v/s 65nm. Thats about 2/3's more space for stream processors which should show this improvement.

Someone will get dx10 running on xp, and if not then I'll have to live without it, I don't game all that much anyway. I hate most everything about Vista so I don't see it ever being appealing to me, and remember my main os isn't windows based.

I'm just curious as to which architecture is more efficient, sli or cf