ATI 2900 XT: A Quick Look

[Rytr]

Its been a while for me, at least not since the 9800 Pro which still sets on the shelf, since have I used an ATI card. But there was was a string of cards preceding that venerable card, the 9600-series, the 9500 Pro, and of course the 8500. Being associated with an NVIDIA fan site I finally succumbed and have used and enjoyed NVIDIA based cards and products almost totally for the last several years. While I have seen the discussions get out of hand and seemly fueled by others it all has been interesting. Times are changing and the other day I ran across a chance to try a new ATI card and I just could not pass it up. It happens to be a 2900XT with 512MB of on-board ram. Not a small card by any stretch of the imagination. A full 9 and 5/8 inches long from stem to stern and weighing half again as much as my 7950 GX2 with a massive copper heatsink and fan. But what could I fit it in? My options were a an Antec P160, P180, (both with 600W PSUs, 650i boards, and e6600 processors) or my latest project a smaller mid-size Antec low-budget case with a 650i board, E6600 processor, but with a 480W PSU. Right away I found out the smaller case was out, not only by physical size dimensions but also by lack of power from the power supply. The P160 would made a nice fit for the card but I have it setup the way I want so the verdict came down to the P180.

The main reason I accepted this 'loaner' from a friend is because this card's specs looks so good on paper even if an odd mix. I mean 512MB of onboard GDDR3 memory rated at 825 MHz using a 512-bit wide memory bus combined with a core clock rated at 740 MHz it can theoretically produce a memory bandwidth of around 100GB/s. It features 320 Stream Processor Units (SPUs) with 32 Texture Address Units (TAUs) and 16 Rasterization Operator Units (ROPs). Seems the 8800 GTS features the same number of ROPs (16) and the GTX features 8 more (24) and the same number of TAUs (32) but SPUs or collections of floating point processors there is a significant difference with the 2900XT claiming 320 or 192 more SPUs than the 8800 GTX. Anyway, a friend gave me the opportunity to try one out and I said sure, why not!

First off the system I used is listed in my sig below. Install went smooth and drivers were no problem with the 7.5's loading right up in Vista. A quick run through at the beginning S.T.A.L.K.E.R. map played out very smooth and indicated frames were very fast and graphics were incredibly good. Since it's not my card I did not attempt an overclock and I know that many owners claim that more can be gained. Be that as it may I give you the following benchmark results:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R: I ran the card at 'Full Dynamic Lighting' with in-game Quality Settings at maximum. All the 'Advanced' settings were at the same or better settings than what I used in the recent review of the Inno3D iChill 8600GTS. The results were a solid 93 FPS at 1280x1024, dropping to a solid 73 FPS at 1600x1200 in the Buildings timedemo. In the outdoor timedemo there was a little more variation but still not too wide spread coming up with an average of 95 FPS at 1280x1024 and 73.5 FPS at 1600x1200.



I ran the benchmark again with all the settings maxed-out, even grass shadows turned on to see what extent the card could take.



As you can see from the graph above the card faired pretty well. Hmm, I am beginning to see now that I am going to have a hard time getting this card out of my case.

F.E.A.R: In-game settings at maximum, 4xAA/16xAF at 1280x960 = 32 min, 88 avg, 188 max FPS; 4AA/16AF at 1600x1200 = 20 min, 63 avg, 132 max FPS. (soft shadows did not make more than 1-2 FPS difference in the benchmark runs)


How about some DX10 Demos?

CALL OF JUAREZ v.1.3.0en (May 25,2005 demo): Set this timedemo with shadowmap size at 2048x2048 instead of 1024x1024 and shadows quality at 'custom' to get the full '3.' Shadow quality has the options of low, medium, high, and custom which equals 0, 1, 2, and 3. No need skimping, eh? After all need to see what the card can do out of the box with no tweaks. So the following graphs show results of the HD2900XT off the shelf, right out of the box, with no tweaks at default factory clocks but with the latest 7.5 drivers being the only exception running DX10 demo at max settings.




LOST PLANET: Looks to be an interesting game. Demo is not polished but what demo is? Some problems with the antialiasing so I cannot say for sure if any was applied. HDR was set at 'medium' in the game settings and AF set at 16x. Most of the settings set at High. Just ran it on a 20-inch 4:3 LCD screen.



That's my 'off the cuff' look at the HD 2900XT. My opinion: Yes, it makes noise and it is big (or long might be a better description). It is kinda gaudy red with flames but some probably like that, I don't.

Back to the noise, I wear a good set of Sennheiser 595's so that does not particularly bother me and I am sure third party cooling systems are on the way for another option other than going with water cooling for this card. As far as performance that still is in somewhat a grey area. I keep hearing that better drivers are needed or this or that. Seems the card does a good job as is; it just does not perform consistently with a 8800GTX. At least that's my take but I don't have a 8800GTX so what do I know. What I do know is that anyone with this card only needs this card for now and maybe a PSU with one of those cotton-pickin' extra 2x4-pin power connectors so you can overclock it!

[Sazar]

I can't wait to see how the bugger folds

The 1GB card is relatively cheap, waiting to see if it's an option

[slaWter]

Thanks for the feedback, quality post!

[Xion X2]

Nice little review. Just wanted to comment on Lost Planet and the overclocking.

The only way to get Lost Planet running w/ AA is to set the HDR value to high in the game menu, and with them both enabled it takes quite a hit on DX9/XP. Can't speak for Vista/DX10 as I don't have it. Keep in mind I was running the 7.6s w/ the latest hotfix at the time of testing this out. It may be different on the 7.5s, not sure.

It can be overclocked w/ 2 six-pins easily using either the AMD GPU tool or the latest ATI Tool beta(.27). You only need the 8-pin connector if using the Catalyst Overdrive to overclock with. ATI Tool is great for it, because an easy voltage adjustment can net you ~50-75MHz extra on the core and probably more than that on the RAM. I bumped mine half a tenth of a volt (1.15 > 1.20) and the core is perfectly stable at 900MHz. I can still go a lot higher, but I have to get some ramsinks for the circuitries/RAM as they get rather warm with more voltage.

[Sazar]

Isn't there supposed to be some higher-clocked 1 GB version on the market?

Can't see it for sale anywhere

Rytr, Xion, keep posting the results and info helps some of us out a bit.

[SH64]

How come other benchmarks show the 2900XT too weak in Stalker ?

[MikeC]

Nice work Steve.

[Rytr]

Xion X2 Thanks for the updates, as I missed those. Again I was somewhat limited in not being able to show any overclock results as I am sure the card has some headroom potential from looking at your reported results and reported results of others. The ones I have shown were strictly out-of-box, no tweaks of any kind and as you have noted I was even behind by one driver release...I missed that and did not intend to!

[Rytr]

Originally Posted by SH64

How come other benchmarks show the 2900XT too weak in Stalker ?

I'm sorry, I seldom pay much attention to other benchmarks results except Mike's because I know how he does his and I have not seen him benchmarking STALKER.
If you will PM me I will look and see what you are specifically referring to but I would prefer not bringing it up in the forum. Maybe they are benching at much higher resolutions or something. I limited mine, in this particular testing to 16x12 with everything in the game maxed out. I do play the game and can vouch for what the card can do well and what the card has problems with. The game itself, as you probably know has some problems.

[Xion X2]

Originally Posted by Rytr

Xion X2 Thanks for the updates, as I missed those. Again I was somewhat limited in not being able to show any overclock results as I am sure the card has some headroom potential from looking at your reported results and reported results of others. The ones I have shown were strictly out-of-box, no tweaks of any kind and as you have noted I was even behind by one driver release...I missed that and did not intend to!

No problem. It's hard to keep up to date in this biz. If you need the latest hotfix drivers, send me a PM and I'll link you to them. The 7.6s gave me some problems with AA on a few games that the hotfix took care of.

There haven't really been major performance increases across the board in any of these driver releases so far that I've seen. I think it's all about working the bugs out at this stage of the game. Performance will come later. Oblivion did show a massive improvement w/ AA enabled on the 7.6s w/ the hotfix. It was running terrible on the 7.5s. Performance has tripled w/ the latest 7.6 hotfix (actually labeled the 8.39.)

Most I've seen are getting ~850MHz on the stock cooler. I got 875 on mine w/o a voltage bump, but I was on water at the time. I've found that it scales in performance really well when overclocking. I'm seeing ~20% gains in many titles.

[Xion X2]

Here's the latest hotfix for the Catalyst if you want to give it a go:

http://support.ati.com/ics/support/d...estionID=28188

[Blacklash]

I'll be a parrot and add this again,

The MSI HD 2900XT comes with a 6pin to 8pin power adapter. Yes, you can get them elsewhere I am sure.