SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT REVIEW

"The Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT is compared to the XFX GeForce 7900 GT. The Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT RV630 GPU is clocked 32% faster, has 40% faster memory and 96 more Pixel Shaders compared to XFX GeForce 7900 GT. Another advantage the Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT has is GDDR4 memory but unfortunately it also has a major disadvantage which is the 128Bit Memory Interface, how will this effect performance?"

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT FEATURES

"Are you ready for the next evolutionary step in HD gaming? Experience DirectX® 10 gaming and HD media PC features with the Sapphire ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 XT. No longer are you chained to the confining dimensions of traditional PC screens, step outside the ordinary and into a world of big screen HD content playback with the Sapphire 2600 XT. Experience next generation hardware that promises immersive high definition gaming for Windows Vista™ and DirectX® 10 to run the hottest titles."

"Delivering a fully loaded HD feature-set including support for ATI Avivo™ HD, Blu-ray / HD DVD decoding via Universal Video Decoding technology, the Sapphire 2600 XT far surpasses the demands of the performance hungry Media PC. The Sapphire Radeon™ HD 2600 XT with its impressive hardware offerings such as: the much anticipated ATI Radeon™ HD 2600 XT GPU, support for up to 256/512MB GDDR3/GDDR4 memory of onboard memory, 128-bit memory interface, and PCI-E 16X support will empower even the casual user to experience big screen HD gaming on a budget and provide the rendering muscle to drive the feature rich Windows Vista™ 3D environment."

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT SPECIFICATIONS

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

120 stream processing units
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
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

Texture filtering features

2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes
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

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 and video overlays
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

Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder

Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation

PRODUCT SPEC

390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
128-bit GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
Anti-aliasing features
Texture filtering features
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT CARD

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT SPECIFICATIONS

VIDEO CARD	GPU	CORE CLOCK	MEMORY CLOCK	MEMORY TYPE	MEMORY INTERFACE	PIXEL SHADER	DIRECTX
SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT	RV630	800	2200	256MB GDDR4	128	120	DX10
XFX GEFORCE 7900 GT	G71	550	1320	256MB GDDR3	256	24	DX9.0C
VIDEO CARD	GPU	CORE CLOCK	MEMORY CLOCK	MEMORY TYPE	MEMORY INTERFACE	PIXELS SHADER	DIRECTX

SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT REVIEW INDEX

PAGE 1 - SAPPHIRE RADEON HD 2600 XT INTRODUCTION

PAGE 2 - 3DMARK 2006 RESULT

PAGE 3 - LIGHTSPEED, PASSMARK, SHADERMARK AND POWERVR FABLE

PAGE 4 - AQUAMARK3, DOOM 3, PREY AND SERIOUS SAM 2

PAGE 5 - CRYSIS, LOST PLANET AND SUPREME COMMANDER FORGED ALLIANCE

PAGE 6 - TRACKMANIA NATIONS FOREVER, WORLD IN CONFLICT AND FINAL RESULT

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