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Radeon HD 2600XT first impressions
We just put the Radeon HD 2600XT through its paces in our labs. The successor to the X1650 chip, it's AMDs fastest mainstream product and will compete with Nvidia's Geforce 8600GT on price.
We tested with AMD's latest stable drivers '8.38.9-rc3' but there exist some 'performance' drivers out there which we'll soon give it a go with.
So, we achieved 5971 in 3DMark06 and 10,358 in 3DMark05, making it faster than the 8600GT in both these theoretical benchmarks at 1,024x768 running on an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard, 1GB Ram and a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor.
It's faster in Half-Life 2 without anti-aliasing and just using trilinear filtering, but slower when 4xAA and 4xAF is turned on.
It's slower in Far Cry and slower in UT2004 by margins of 10 per cent. It's a similar case in Doom3 where the HD 2600XT looses out to the 8600GT at low resolution but beats it at 1,600x1,200 and beyond.
The Radeon HD 2600XT isn't a patch on the Geforce 8600GTS which is more expensive, and AMD hopes to compete with the faster 8600GTS card with the Radeon HD 2600XT Gemini, which is a single card with two 2600XT chips on it.
Where the Radeon HD 2600XT does save face though is in its vast array of features.
Like the 2900XT, all Radeon HD chips (bar the HD 2300 which is simply a rebranded X1300) include a hardware tessellation chip, which is a real boon and should improve 3D image quality in compatible games dramatically. This chip splits triangles into multiple triangles resulting in a greater level of perceived detail, without a significant performance hit.
Three game studios are currently working on titles for it according to AMD and what's more the tessellator will be a part of the DirectX 11 spec, due to be released in 18 months – two years according to AMD. It doesn't know if AMD's tessellator is the one to be used, since there can apparently be different kinds of tessellator.
The 2600XT also excels in multimedia use thanks to an audio controller built into the GPU that outputs audio through the graphics card DVI port no problem (with the aid of an HDMI dongle). We couldn't get the HD Audio controller driver to install on our test system though.
The Radeon HD range should also have superior high definition playback quality too according to AMD. We've recently got hold of an HD DVD version of the HQV test and we'll be confirming these claims as soon as possible too.
Hardware VC-1 decode which is another important feature Nvidia has omitted from its cards. It's appearing in more and more Blu-ray and HD DVD titles and is vital for low CPU utilisation.
What out for a full review soon.
Posted by Emil Larsen on June 28, 2007 | Permalink
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Comments
Does anyone know what the system power requirements are for the Radeon HD 2600XT? The 2900 tested in PCW had a huge power requirement, so I hope the 2600XT is a bit more reasonable.
Posted by: Chris Thomson | 29 Jun 2007 19:21:02
i think it has a 65W profile, all powered through the pci-e slot on the sapphire card.
Posted by: mike | 7 Jul 2007 13:37:36
