Valve has Informed us about their plans to deliver free games to all owners of ATI RadeonT graphics cards via Steam, a popular platform for the distribution and management of digital content.
Effective immediately, all owners of ATI Radeon graphics cards may receive a free copy of Half-Life 2: Lost Coast and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch via Steam, http://www.steampowered.com/ati_offer1a/. Steam will automatically confirm the presence of ATI RadeonT hardware and then enable immediate access to full versions of the games free of charge.
For added convenience to new purchasers of ATI RadeonT products, Steam will be included in all ATI CatalystT Software and Driver packages through early 2008.
And, as recently announced by AMD, customers who purchase the new ATI RadeonT HD 2900 XT will also receive, upon release via Steam, the highly anticipated trio of new games coming from Valve: Team Fortress® 2, PortalT, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two.
That’s a very good deal, we expect to see more Radeon users within the next few weeks.
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Tag: RadeonThe people at HardOCP seem to think so. Judging from the article, ATI’s newest cards just aren’t what enthusiasts had hoped for as far as performance and quality. Sadly, I was also reading multiple reviews about the Dodge Avenger today and the outcome was just about the same, just swap a few words and tech terms around.
At the high-end the Radeon HD 2900 XT is based off of an ATI and TSMC proprietary 80nm HS processes and contains 700 million transistors. The Radeon HD 2900 XT will have 320 stream processing units and carry a core clock speed of 740 (742.7 MHz actual). Note that there are not separate clock domains; the streaming processors and the core (texture units and ROPs) all run at the same speed unlike the G80 which runs the shader processors much faster than everything else.
The texture units and render back-ends (ROPs) are separate units and there are 16 of both on the Radeon HD 2900 XT. There will be 512 MB of GDDR3 on a 512-bit memory bus clocked at 825 MHz (1.65 GHz) on the Radeon HD 2900 XT. This gives us 106 GB/sec of memory bandwidth available. Native CrossFire is back and fully supported with the Radeon HD 2900 XT.
“This sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 jigawatts of electricity I need” – Doctor Emmett Brown
OK, it isn’t that bad, but the quoted power draw is 215W at full load which is the highest power draw from any consumer 3D graphics card. For a single Radeon HD 2900 XT ATI recommends a 550W power supply. For CrossFire a 750W power supply is recommended. Power leakage is a reported problem with this GPU. Different Radeon HD 2900 XT video cards, depending on binning, will have different wattages. So if you purchase two video cards, they could very much be pulling greater or lesser wattages. Ambient temperature fluctuations will also cause differing power utilization, as the temperature increases power draw increases fast.
This video card will be bundled with the Valve Half Life 2 Black Box containing Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half Life 2: Episode 2. Since the Valve Black Box is not out yet the bundles will include a voucher. The entire package will be $399.
An interesting note concerning the 3DMark tests of this card and the Geforce 8800 GTX:
…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.
Despite what the numbers in 3DMark are showing our evaluation has proven that the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is slower than a GeForce 8800 GTS when it comes to actually gaming. Even our apples-to-apples real gaming tests confirmed that the 8800 GTS is faster than the HD 2900 XT and nowhere close to the GeForce 8800 GTX, yet here sits 3DMark showing us the opposite!
Needless to say, if you design your system around 3DMark scores you may not be making the more solid choices.