So, here we are at last, with DirectX 10 hardware from ATI after an excruciatingly long wait.  Was it worth it?

On the positive side, the raw performance of the Radeon HD 2900 XT is, in keeping with its specifications, awesome.  Throw any game title you like at it without anti-aliasing enabled and it'll tear through it at a rate of knots, more often than not leaving its direct rival, the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, for dead.  But, therein lays the problem - Who buys a high-end graphics board to game without anti-aliasing enabled?  Sure, there are a small handful of people who do just that, but the vast majority of gamers demand fantastic performance with at least 4x anti-aliasing turned on.  This is where the lustre of the Radeon HD 2900 XT begins to fade - Quite simply, its level of performance drops once anti-aliasing is turned on is unacceptable.  Thankfully, that raw performance helps to at least bring it close or equal to the GeForce 8800 GTS in a lot of situations, but it isn't the G80 killer many hoped for or wanted, and that's without even daring to mention the GeForce 8800 GTX or Ultra.

Of course, level pegging with the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB on both pricing and performance isn't such a bad place to be either, right?  We already know that the aforementioned board is a stellar performer, so to be mentioned in the same sentence as it is nothing to be ashamed.  However, that brings us to another big 'but' - The GeForce 8800 GTS offers very similar performance, yes, but it does so while requiring significantly less power and producing significantly less heat.  Although both boards use dual slot coolers, NVIDIA's offering is far quieter in this respect, while the Radeon HD 2900 XT features (and bear in mind this is coming from somebody who never owned or tested the much-maligned GeForce FX 5800 Ultra) quite simply the loudest graphics board cooler I've ever used.  In 2D mode its fine, but as soon as any kind of intensive rendering begins, the fan noise becomes very irritating indeed.  I'm used to working with loud PCs, and I'm not normally one to complain, but the Radeon HD 2900 XT was a bridge too far for me personally in that respect.

At the end of the day, there's nothing particularly wrong with the Radeon HD 2900 XT - It has a very full DirectX 10 feature set, an interesting set of anti-aliasing modes (including some even more exciting ones in the pipeline), and basically does everything that is asked of it without question and with high performance to boot.  Throw in the Valve 'Black Box' voucher, an excellent price and pretty decent bundle, and Sapphire's board makes a good case for itself as far as R600-based boards go too.  The problem is, almost everything it can do the GeForce 8800 GTS has already offered for some time, and in a quieter, cooler package to boot.

The final positive for ATI is that there is undoubtedly still a fair amount of juice left in the tank with regard to driver improvements, and if they bear fruit then who knows, maybe we'll be forced to change our mind and hail the Radeon HD 2900 XT in ways that we haven't here today.  Even then though, those heat and power requirements will still be off-putting to many, and sadly that isn't something that a simple driver can fix.

Product information

Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB

- Vendor web site
- Vendor product information

Retail pricing and availability (at time of going to press):

Scan - £263.54 including VAT
Overclockers UK - £264.36 including VAT
Dabs - £250.99 including VAT
Komplett - £250 including VAT

Many thanks to Sapphire for providing the sample for this review 

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