DirectX 10 Impressions
After Windows Vista came out with a bunch of bugs and apparent driver issues that essentially ruled it out as a serious operating system choice for gamers for the time being, we thought the entire project that we had been looking forward to was turning out to be not as great as we expected. Then we heard news that DirectX 10, the brand new graphics API from Microsoft, would be exclusively available on Windows Vista. Then we got all excited and sat there like kids waiting for the candy store to open on a Saturday morning. That was a big waste of time, as DirectX 10 ports of DirectX 9 games are only JUST starting to pop up now, 5 months later. Rumor on the street is we will be waiting a bit longer for the first true DX10 games to hit the shelves, and still longer for hardware that will be able to run REAL DX10 games with any competence on high resolutions. Annoyed doesn’t begin to describe what we felt after hearing this news.

However, after seeing firsthand what even a primitive DX10 port-over is capable of, we feel somewhat vindicated. Maybe, just MAYBE, these games we are still waiting for are actually WORTH waiting for. If the videos we have seen online are any indication, we think they just might be.

As far as the actual tests we ran in this article are concerned, we didn’t notice even a slight difference between DX9 and DX10 modes in the Company of Heroes benchmark. That cinematic sequence just does not seem to operate under the same principles as the game itself, which is an RTS, not a first/third person shooter as the benchmark would suggest. However, in Call of Juarez, the increased detail is definitely noticeable. Shadows look better, lighting effects are awesome, and the detail in various well-placed textures around the game is pretty stunning.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions
It was not easy bringing you this first glimpse of the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1024MB video cards. A few short days and a couple of sleepless nights were needed to bring you the content you see, but as you can tell, there is a lot more information that needs to be presented. We were unable to test every game on every card, and we were unable to test any card but the HD 2900XT 1GB in Vista thanks to an ungodly devastating system crash. However, we feel that the information we have presented here is accurate and will be seen again pretty soon in reviews that should be going up later this week. We have an opportunity to snag a couple more of these cards pretty soon and we may just be able to fill in the spaces that we left blank in this review.

Until then, we can only offer our opinion of this latest R600 implementation based on the information we have gathered from our limited testing. It is pretty clear that the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1024MB board is at the pinnacle of performance for current R600-based graphics boards. However, it is also pretty clear that despite their best attempts, ATI/AMD are still playing catch-up to a video card NVIDIA launched almost 7 months ago. Coming close in one benchmark (3DMark06) out of 13 is not exactly what we could call a triumphant return to the prowess that ATI enjoyed at the top of the graphics performance world. However, if there is one thing that ATI’s current direction has, it is promise. One consequence of AMD and ATI teaming up is something called Fusion, the eventual melding of a CPU and a GPU together into one uber processor. We had already seen GPUs from both companies, especially ATI, become increasingly more suited for general purpose computations. This is quite evident with the recent release of “Tesla” from NVIDIA, a General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) platform that will dramatically accelerate certain computations. We have also maintained throughout our testing of the HD 2900 series that those 320 stream processors seem like they could be a dormant powerhouse waiting to be awoken by a driver update or some sort of killer application that really takes advantage of their pure processing capacity. This is all just speculation and gut feeling however, so please don’t take this statement to heart.

The drivers we were initially supplied with for this review were internal Catalyst versions 8.383 and 8.39. Neither of those drivers would allow us to enable CrossFire on the HD2900 XT 1024MB, nor does the very recently released Catalyst 7.6 (in our experience), so we had to resort to the somewhat-dated Catalyst 7.5 drivers available for public download on ATI’s website. It is possible that these drivers do not include the certain features that take advantage of the extra graphics memory on the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT graphics boards, but from what we’ve seen from these cards over the weekend, we won’t be holding our breath on that one.

In the end, the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT is an excellent final implementation of ATI’s R600 GPU. However, an excellent implementation of R600 seems to be somewhat of a pushover when its slated against NVIDIA’s now half-year old G80. We hate to say it, but this is not good news for ATI or AMD, whatever they call themselves now. -

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