ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 1GB
Specs

ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Technology – GPU Specifications
* 700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process
* 1024MB GDDR4 graphics memory
* 512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface (1024-bit internal ring bus)
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture

• 320 stream processing units (Read: Unified shaders)
• 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
• High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
• Physics processing support

* Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0

• Shader Model 4.0

* 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
• 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

* CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology
* ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform

• Two independent display controllers
• Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
• HDMI output support

• Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
• 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

* PCI Express x16 bus interface
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* 742MHz core clock and stream processor clock, 1000MHz memory clock (2000MHz effective).

If this seems like a pretty long list of specs, please keep in mind that it is totally a Cliff-Notes version. You can find a full list of the specifications of the Radeon HD 2900 series graphics cards on the ATI website. Keeping with tradition, we’ll go over the important things from top to bottom. First off we see the transistor count for the R600 GPU is 700 million. That is quite a lot considering Intel’s Kentsfield (quad-core) has 582 million. We won’t get into the details of what this means for the performance and features of the part, but let’s just say with 700 million transistors there is a lot of real estate for some cool stuff (quick and dirty explanation because we don’t really know..). Obviously the big thing with this particular product is the 1024MB of GDDR4 graphics memory. The version of the R600 that was released last month carried a mere 512MB of GDDR3. A little known fact about this card is that it had an older brother, the fabled Radeon HD 2900XTX, which was 12.4 inches long, sported a different cooling solution, and also had 1024MB of GDDR4 graphics memory. Aesthetically speaking, the card was (and is; expect to see that product reincarnated as a FireGL part in the near future) the most impressive thing we have seen from a consumer level graphics card – ever. That is not necessarily a good thing, and performance numbers (those posted on DailyTech) seemed to show that size isn’t everything. Regardless, the new HD 2900XT with 1024MB shares the form factor of its HD 2900XT 512MB brethren. Previously the most memory available on a consumer level graphics card was 768MB on NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GTX (besides the GeForce 7950GX2, which was more like a gnarly hodgepodge of graphics horsepower than a video card). NVIDIA also released a workstation computational platform video card in its Tesla series that sports 1.5GB of graphics memory – but you won’t be playing games on that.