From what we have found during benchmarking the graphics card for future reviews, only Half-Life 2, Company of Heroes and Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars have more or less substantial performance increases with the newer drivers. Those improvements does not change our conclusion regarding the product.

Since the vast majority of today’s games use realistic lighting, detailed textures and high-quality special effects, we do not know why anyone would decrease texture filtering quality to add rather ugly artifacts.

Given that in the last two years we tested a number of performance-mainstream graphics cards with 256-bit memory bus and decent performance with FSAA 4x, we have no idea why we have to step back to no-FSAA mode ahead of the ATI RV670 and Nvidia G8M launch, both of which are projected to feature 256-bit memory bus.

Please keep in mind that enabling FSAA does not affect relative performance of different products.

And again, ATI 2600 and nvidia 8600 are 128 bit bus cards

ATI Radeon HD 2600-series is positioned for the same price-points as the Radeon X1650/X1950 were, which were tested with FSAA. What's the purpose of degrading IQ on new-generation solutions?

If the new solutions cannot handle high image quality, then we can do nothing with it.

You said right performance mainstream.
Where those cards cost(ed) 200$ and more.
The cards you are reviewing cost 100$ or less.

You know most games have an Options Menu where you can change game detail settings to low, medium, high, very high.
So you can make sure you can play games with the right FPS amount for the type of card you have.

Low end card = Low detail settings.
Medium card = Medium detail settings.
High end card = High detail settings.

If Radeon HD 2600 Pro cannot enable FSAA in 3-years old Far Cry game with highest settings, what this card is for then?

Actually AMD's midrange is on par with nvdia's midrage....

just because the review noobs want to turn on AA and AF to the max on these cards,the performance of X2600Xt looks bad

+ using new nvidia and old ATI drivers is really weird

It’s also important to mention that at those settings makes any of those games unplayable with ATI or NVIDIA cards.

Please see separate review covering media playback:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/video-playback 2.html

that would be like,hum, never.....

"wherever possible"

I agree with that but it is not possible with the 2600Pro (the reason of this review) in the games reviewd here at a 1600x1200 resolution. And in 1280x1024 may be in FEAR, Far cry, HL, CoH DX9 (and not comfortable) and Oblivion indoor tests.

"I have a 7600GT in my other rig and enable AA/AF wherever possible. "

By possible you mean:
-the games allow you enable the settings. Just 10fps
-Or the games are playable with those settings. +40fps

Please see separate review covering media playback:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/video-playback 2.html