Introduction

ATI were well behind nVidia when it came to releasing their DX10 hardware. 6 months passed between the introduction of the 8800 range from the green guys before the boys in red brought their 2xxx series of cards to the table. Even then, the king of GPUs at the time, the GTX, was still way out of the 2900XT's league. However, many have claimed it is a fantastic mid-high range solution; let's see if we concur.

Features and Specifications

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

• 320 stream processing units
  
• Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  
• Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
  
• Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
  
• 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
  
• Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
  
• Shader instruction and constant caches
  
• Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
  
• Up to 128 textures per pixel
  
• Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
  
• DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
  
• High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
  
• Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
  
• Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
  
• Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
  
• Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
  
• Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
  
• 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
  
• Physics processing support

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0

• Shader Model 4.0
  
• Geometry Shaders
  
• Stream Output
  
• Integer and Bitwise Operations
  
• Alpha to Coverage
  
• Constant Buffers
  
• State Objects
  
• Texture Arrays

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration

• High performance vertex cache
  
• Programmable tessellation unit
  
• Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
  Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

Anti-aliasing features

• Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
  
• Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
  
• Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
  
• Temporal anti-aliasing
  
• Gamma correct
  
• Super AA (CrossFire™ configurations only)
  
• All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

Texture filtering features

• 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
  
• 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
  
• Bicubic filtering
  
• sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
  
• Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
  
• Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
  
• Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology

• Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
  
• Integrated compositing engine
  
• High performance dual channel interconnect

ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

• Two independent display controllers
  
• Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
  
• Full 30-bit display processing
  
• Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
  
• Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
  
• High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
  
• Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  
• Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  
• Hardware cursor
  
• Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
  
• Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
  
• Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
  
• Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
  
• Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363
  
• HDMI output support
  
• Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080i
  
• Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
  
• Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
  
• Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
  
• Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
  
• Underscan and overscan compensation
  
• HD decode for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats
  
• Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray™ playback
  
• Motion compensation and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation)
  
• HD video processing
  
• Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  
• De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  
• Edge enhancement
  
• Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
  
• Bad edit correction
  
• High fidelity gamma correction, color correction, color space conversion, and scaling
  
• MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
  
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
  
• VGA mode support on all display outputs