Sapphire Technologies delivers the Radeon HD2900XT with some mixed reactions

Introduction

Sapphire Technology is a Hong Kong based company that specialise in graphic cards. They are close partners with AMD-ATI, and with that in mind, they've recently released their Radeon HD2900XT based PCIe graphic card. With all the rumours and comments about AMD-ATI in recent months, it's hardly surprising that no one is actually focusing on the main issue here ... And that is to satisfy the needs of the consumers. Delays of the ATi R600 GPU and the lack of new AMD processors haven't helped either. I just feel that AMD-ATI have a real battle ahead just to play catch up with Intel and Nvidia.

         

There have been reports and reviews from other hardware websites, that the Radeon HD2900XT offered less than impressive performance against Nvidia's high-end 8800GTX. Driver issues and Vista compatibility as well as DX10 support have plagued the Radeon.

The Radeon HD2900XT is based on ATi's reference design, and it's currently Sapphire's highest end graphic card designed and aimed at the enthusiasts. It uses ATi's latest GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) ... the R600, it supports DX10 and has a massive 512Mb of GDDR3 ram.

         

DirectX 10 and compatible games are all the talk at the moment, so we've managed to get hold of two game demos ... Lost Planet and Call of Juarez, both are DirectX 10 ready and we will be using them to test the Radeon HD2900XT from Sapphire.

With Nvidia currently enjoying its dominance in the enthusiast and gamers market, I fear that the ATi/AMD might find it an up-hill struggle. Already, Nvidia have released their highest-end enthusiast product ... the Geforce 8800 Ultra, with a SLI version already out.

OK, lets not waste any more time and see what the Sapphire Radeon HD2900XT can do for us ...