Introduction

ATI's 2xxx range of cards has received mixed press throughout review sites since their release. Today I get my first play with with one of them, the HD 2600XT from Sapphire. Let's see if it lives up to its budget card ideals.

Specifications

• 390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
• 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
• Ring Bus Memory Controller
  • Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
• Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
  • 120 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 40 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
  • Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
    • High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
  • Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
    • Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
  • Avivo Video Post Processor
    • Color space conversion
    • Chroma subsampling format conversion
    • Horizontal and vertical scaling
    • Gamma correction
  • High Quality Video Post Processing
    • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
    • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
    • Detail enhancement
    • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
    • Bad edit correction
  • 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 2048x15361
  • HDMI output support
    • Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
    • 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
  • 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
• PCI Express x16 bus interface
• OpenGL 2.0 support

A little about Sapphire

Established since 1994, GALAXY Technology is dedicated in the manufacturing and distribution of quality computer components. Head office in Hong Kong and factory located in China, this combination of business structure offers us the very competitive edge. It combines all the advantage of technology vision, technology know-how, and the cost competitiveness of production in China.
Focus and dedication

VGA card manufacturing is our prime business. After years of establishment, business is growing solidly and stably, with quality to be our No.1 priority, our products can meet the most demanding OEM requirement.And we believe in Win-Win, customer's growth and profitability is our key concern, that is how we establish our strong foot hold from the years of OEM manufacturing with our partners.
Vision to grow

Business growth is enormous, in early 2000, we have taken major step to further expand market by launching our brands of NVIDIA line VGA card - Glacier and Zeus. The encouraging result and feedback from customers has confirmed our strategy to fully explore Glacier and Zues brands and distribution. Growth of business do not stop at computer card manufacturing, in parallel with our long years of exposure in computer field, it gained us extensive networks in Hong Kong, SouthEast Asia, USA, Europe and China.
NB. Taken from "About Galaxy" from GalaxyTech.com.