Conclusion

The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro is undoubtedly a success. Priced at only $249 it provides an acceptable speed in most of our tests as opposed to graphics cards with the mainstream GPUs RV630 and G84. We really doubt that even a Radeon HD 2600 X2 would match the performance of the new card because it would be inferior to the Radeon HD 2900 Pro in the amount of ALUs and raster back-ends (240 and 8 against 320 and 16, respectively) as well as in memory subsystem performance. We don’t even count in the possible compatibility problems the dual-chip solution is sure to have.

Considering the imminent arrival of graphics cards with ATI’s new RV670 core, there is no sense in producing the Radeon HD 2600 X2 in mass quantities. The Radeon HD 2900 Pro, even in small quantities, can successfully fill in the gap between the Radeon HD 2900 and HD 2600 families. It fulfils this purpose even better than the sophisticated Radeon HD 2600 X2 with all its potential problems. Well, we’ll obtain one of those unique dual-chip graphics cards in near future and perform a comparative test.

As for drawbacks, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro has them just like any other product, but the most important one is the low availability. As we wrote above, this card is going to come to market in hardly more than 10 thousand copies, and many people just won’t have a chance to buy one. This may also affect the retail price of the card. Besides, the card has all the drawbacks of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT such as high power consumption, a high level of noise in 3D mode, a bottleneck of 16 TMUs (which are also clocked at a reduced frequency now), and architectural peculiarities that make the card’s performance dependent on driver optimizations.

And still, with all these minor problems, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro is perhaps the best graphics card in the $249 price category – if you are lucky to find it selling for this price!

Highs:

• Good performance in $249 price range;
• DirectX 10 support;
• Wide range of supported FSAA modes;
• High-quality anisotropic filtering;
• Uses fully-fledged R600 GPU;
• Super-scalar micro-architecture with 320 shader processors;
• 512-bit memory bus;
• High-quality multi-GPU support;
• Low recommended price.

Lows:

• Performance depends on driver quality a lot;
• High power consumption;
• High level of generated noise;
• Poor availability because of very few graphics cards manufactured.