ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT - The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is here for us to put it through its DX10 paces. Who will take home the crown in the first full DirectX 10 game under Windows Vista? New games including Oblivion: Shivering Isles, WoW: Burning Crusade, Lord of the Rings Online, and Lost Planet.

The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is simply not a good value for gaming. For the same price, you can buy a video card producing a better gaming experience. The 2600 XT is too little, too late, and does not offer sufficient performance to challenge NVIDIA's 8-series market domination. Conversely, the 2600 XT offered us an incredible HD movie experience with its UVD engine performing better than expected, so this may very well be the card for you HTPC users. Gamers however will be better off going with an NVIDIA based 8-series video card.
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Good read. I noticed there were two different versions of the 2600XT on Newegg, the GDDR3 and GDDR4. The size is a lot different! However this is a well done review. Yet I wonder if new drivers later would improve its performance just like the 2900XT.
 
Interesting. The more I see this unfold, the more I'm glad I went with option C: buy last generation's latest and greatest that outperforms them both in DX9 (X1950Pro :D).

This is especially true with DX10 being a non-issue this generation (unless you like playing at 640x480 with absolutely no difference other than a huge performance drop). Both sides have produced an FX5800 with regards to DX10 performance. Way to go guys.

Guess I'm waiting until next gen for DX10 and a video card upgrade.
 
Since the HTPC seems the only really compelling reason to buy these cards, I find it VERY frustrating that they don't (at least for now) have an HDMI cable port from the factory! :rolleyes:
Could nobody at AMD/ATI have forseen this?
 
Mr. Stryker said:
I guess it will be something we'll never understand.
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Until the an HDMI port is the standard on a PC monitor, video card makers will prefer to use the DVI port and provide or sell a dongle.

However..considering that at such low resolutions of DX10 that you gain almost zero benefit compared to DX9...the smart consumer really should stick with last gen video cards like the 1950. I highly doubt we will see a DX10 only game for a couple of years yet.
 
arklab said:
Since the HTPC seems the only really compelling reason to buy these cards, I find it VERY frustrating that they don't (at least for now) have an HDMI cable port from the factory! :rolleyes:
Could nobody at AMD/ATI have forseen this?
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I don't think it's even that...the CPU difference was less than 10%, not something you'd notice in the real world.

As for the HDMI part....I'm right there with you on that. Stupid board makers are too cheap to include this feature. :rolleyes:
 
Now I just hope those rumors of Ati releasing a True midrange card based off of the 2900's is True.
 
ATI took a lot of time getting their HD series to market and apparently they did not take enough
time to make a great product. Maybe it had to do with the ATI/AMD merger. I hope they are
working hard on their next generation of cards because if they do not regain some ground soon
things could get messy. Soon Intel will be joining the graphics card market, and if ATI does not
deliver, it may be Intel vs Nvidia in 2008.
 
munkle said:
Check this review of the 2600. The 2600 has better video quality when playing movies also, well worth it for an htpc.
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I'm curious about this benchmark software they are using. With the masively differerent numbers, why isn't there screen shots to verify some obvious differences? Right now, all I see is "we ran this software, it says this card is better, hell if we know if it is true or not".
 
Trepidati0n said:
I'm curious about this benchmark software they are using. With the masively differerent numbers, why isn't there screen shots to verify some obvious differences? Right now, all I see is "we ran this software, it says this card is better, hell if we know if it is true or not".
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And this is exactly why we don't use it. It is the "3DMark of HD."
 
InorganicMatter said:
Interesting. The more I see this unfold, the more I'm glad I went with option C: buy last generation's latest and greatest that outperforms them both in DX9 (X1950Pro :D).

This is especially true with DX10 being a non-issue this generation (unless you like playing at 640x480 with absolutely no difference other than a huge performance drop). Both sides have produced an FX5800 with regards to DX10 performance. Way to go guys.

Guess I'm waiting until next gen for DX10 and a video card upgrade.
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Absolutely true for the midrange, but if playing DX10 with current hardware is a must, there is one viable option--the 8800 Ultra. Its price has dropped about $250 since introduction and it maintains playability in the broader range of tests in AnandTech's DX10 article.
 
nice review :)
i like the HD-DVD part, definetly a nice card for the HTPC, I wonder how much of a diff in video performance the HD2400 would make, or even the 2600pro
 
I waited this long for these cards glad their was some previews before hand, whew.. Glad I didn't hold out to order one. Can't wait for the x1950xt
 
Commander Suzdal said:
Absolutely true for the midrange, but if playing DX10 with current hardware is a must, there is one viable option--the 8800 Ultra. Its price has dropped about $250 since introduction and it maintains playability in the broader range of tests in AnandTech's DX10 article.
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While I agree with the popular assesment of the article, I do think that many should wait for some actual DX10 titles and not patchwork. If Crysis performs as it should I'll laugh, if not I'll cry. Although from recent videos (Dx9 only so far), it will run fast and look better than anything else out atm. DX10 is unknown at the point, aside from quotes, as there are no gameplay videos of it since Janurary.
 
I know it would have been overkill as far as competing with the 2600XT was concerned, but given that this eval was [H]'s first under Vista with DX10 and a new testing suite, I would have loved to see what the 8600GTS could do just for its own sake, as far as maybe offering a mid-range experience strong enough to satisfy the economically challenged gamer (especially in Lost Planet DX10). Are there any upcoming articles that will showcase the GTS in this testing regime?

One other suggestion that occurs to me: it seems to be [H]'s practice to focus only on the "main card" when you get to the overclocking portion of the review. I think it would be nice to overclock the competing cards as well and see which offers the better results in OC situations. Or is it felt that there's too much variability from chip to chip to make that fair and reliable?
 
Miscommunication said:
While I agree with the popular assesment of the article, I do think that many should wait for some actual DX10 titles and not patchwork. If Crysis performs as it should I'll laugh, if not I'll cry. Although from recent videos (Dx9 only so far), it will run fast and look better than anything else out atm. DX10 is unknown at the point, aside from quotes, as there are no gameplay videos of it since Janurary.
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Lost Planet is a DX10 title. There are two modes, you can lauch the DX9 EXE or the DX10 EXE. We used both on page 7 of this evaluation.
 
Since the only purpose of this series is video decoding can we get more info on that?

A: Does it work for downloaded video files (Trailers, downloaded x264 mkv files etc?).
B: Does it work under windows XP?
C: Does it work in generic players like Media Player Classic.

Because if all this does is offer BluRay/HDDVD playback in proprietary players it is near useless to me.

If has more general applicability I might be interested in adding one of these to extend the life of AGP box by improving the video capabilities. It would still be faster than my 9700Pro hopefully?
 
will there be another article with the HD 2600 pro / 2400 series :p?

In this case, I'd wanna know how the UVD works on slower cards, vs faster ones, if it makes a difference at all
 
Digital Viper-X- said:
will there be another article with the HD 2600 pro / 2400 series :p?

In this case, I'd wanna know how the UVD works on slower cards, vs faster ones, if it makes a difference at all
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Yes, 2600 Pro will be done, we will include that UVD comparison to see if there is any difference in UVD with a slower one.
 
Try testing the newer games or more games
You have been testing the same games over and over and over again.
Stalker and Lost Planet are known that they are optimized for NV cards.
What is your problem? is it that hard to find newer games?
where is DiRT? The graphical show piece
how about Call of Juarez.
Since you are testing under Vista, how could you not include the Halo 2 for vista only?

If you could broaden your test base, at least you would look less biased than hand-picking the optimized games for nvidia.

Jumping to clusion base on testing SIX holy games? This is a misleading crap.
 
bangmal said:
Try testing the newer games or more games
You have been testing the same games over and over and over again.

Jumping to clusion base on testing SIX holy games? This is a misleading crap.
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Ummm, Paying attention? they have changed a few games.

Jumping to conclusions? Have you read any other reviews. I have seen 7-8 of them and they conclude the same thing. This is an ATI SNAFU of grand scale. It doesn't matter which game you use, the results are the same. ATI dropped the ball. They then tripped on the ball and faceplanted, then got back up and stumbled across the road in front of a bus. The depth of the screwup is in slapstick comedy territory. The 2600XT is beaten by the 1650xt/7300GT on some tests!

Either you are completely out to lunch or on the ATI payroll to think there is testing bias going on here. BTW I was always kind of an ATI fan. My last 3 cards were ATI and never have I bought an NVidia card.
 
bangmal said:
Try testing the newer games or more games
You have been testing the same games over and over and over again.
Stalker and Lost Planet are known that they are optimized for NV cards.
What is your problem? is it that hard to find newer games?
where is DiRT? The graphical show piece
how about Call of Juarez.
Since you are testing under Vista, how could you not include the Halo 2 for vista only?

If you could broaden your test base, at least you would look less biased than hand-picking the optimized games for nvidia.

Jumping to clusion base on testing SIX holy games? This is a misleading crap.
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They choose their games on what people are playing.

If you think they can test more games you have no idea what goes into writing one of these reviews.

Every time one of these reviews comes they are accused of bias sometimes I wonder what keeps these guys writing reviews. They get nothing but flak it seems like.
 
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and renders frames like a duck....it's probably a duck.
 
[RCKY] Thor;1031272603 said:
If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and renders frames like a duck....it's probably a duck.
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Exactly@! AMD missed the boat on this round.
 
bangmal said:
Stalker and Lost Planet are known that they are optimized for NV cards.
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And? As I've said before, NVIDIA owners pay for The Way It's Meant To Be Played. They pay for those optimizations (vendor-specific and not), so it stands to reason that they should benefit from those optimizations. [H] is just testing the game. Whether or not a game has been "optimized for NVIDIA" is completely irrelevant. If you don't like the number of developers aligned with TWIMTBP, maybe you should bitch at AMD for their terribly lackluster clone: Get In the Game.

Now, if it was a case of trying to determine general DX9 performance from these two titles, then it could be something of a different story.

bangmal said:
This is a misleading crap.
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Interesting assessment.

R1ckCa1n said:
Exactly@! AMD missed the boat on this round.
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Agreed. It'd be great to have some better mid-range DX10 cards, but both AMD and NVIDIA have decided that it's simply not in the cards -- no pun intended -- this round.

I don't think it's a tremendously big deal, however. Hopefully the trend does not continue in this manner.
 
I am wondering if 3rd-party utilities would UNDERclock the GPU while at desktop and then ramp up the speed when an application is launched. It has been awhile since I used ATITool but rememebr it had an option to use overclock speeds on application launch and I think you could even chose which applications. Just a thought.

Good read though. I appreciate the frankness of it all. It was a bit hard to follow the race last year but this year has just been dismal and uninspiring. Thank you for your hard work and efforts for the community.
 
Commander Suzdal said:
I know it would have been overkill as far as competing with the 2600XT was concerned, but given that this eval was [H]'s first under Vista with DX10 and a new testing suite, I would have loved to see what the 8600GTS could do just for its own sake, as far as maybe offering a mid-range experience strong enough to satisfy the economically challenged gamer (especially in Lost Planet DX10). Are there any upcoming articles that will showcase the GTS in this testing regime?

One other suggestion that occurs to me: it seems to be [H]'s practice to focus only on the "main card" when you get to the overclocking portion of the review. I think it would be nice to overclock the competing cards as well and see which offers the better results in OC situations. Or is it felt that there's too much variability from chip to chip to make that fair and reliable?
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We will probably do more GTS's. We'll take your request into consideration, but typically we do focus on the video card being evaluated, since the one we are comparing it to will usually already have its own evaluation where we OC'd it. This one didn't because we haven't evaluated that XFX card yet.
 
Snowdog said:
Since the only purpose of this series is video decoding can we get more info on that?

A: Does it work for downloaded video files (Trailers, downloaded x264 mkv files etc?).
B: Does it work under windows XP?
C: Does it work in generic players like Media Player Classic.

Because if all this does is offer BluRay/HDDVD playback in proprietary players it is near useless to me.

If has more general applicability I might be interested in adding one of these to extend the life of AGP box by improving the video capabilities. It would still be faster than my 9700Pro hopefully?
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The video playback application must support hardware acceleration of UVD in order for it to work. You must use Vista x32. It does support regular idct MPEG-2 decode as well. Doing a bit of testing just now I saw ~24% CPU utilization decoding a 1080p WMV file using Media Player 11 and a 1080p movie trailer from apple of Transformers with Quicktime.
 
All I have to say is, ouch. If I were an engineer at ATI right now, I wouldn't be able to show my face in public. This has to be quite embarrassing. It's just an overly huge HTPC card.
 
Brent_Justice said:
Lost Planet is a DX10 title. There are two modes, you can lauch the DX9 EXE or the DX10 EXE. We used both on page 7 of this evaluation.
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Oh don't get me wrong, I agree with article's conclusions for what games that are available. I was just pointing out that any of the DX10 capable games out now aren't the best representation of DX10. I only brought up Crysis as an example of what I think will offer a better gaming experience at playable frames vs LP or CoJ. That's not because that Crytek are better developers than Capcom for example, they're just putting real effort into the API. OF course it remains to be seen if even the top DX10 cards are worth their salt or if the problem is on the software/developer side being cheap by using DX9 as a basis for DX10 development. Personally I think it's the developers' "limitations" (read: profit and laziness) and driver maturity in regards to DX10.

Mainly it stems from "the top DX10 cards are doomed" train of thought that's so rampant. As far as I'm concerned I think these cards in the article aren't good enough for DX10, even when developers stop using DX9 as a platform to build from and start fresh with DX10 (or develop them seperately). For DX9 they aren't bad I suppose considering what's already out there, I would still get a top of the line last-gen card.
 
bangmal said:
Try testing the newer games or more games
You have been testing the same games over and over and over again.
Stalker and Lost Planet are known that they are optimized for NV cards.
What is your problem? is it that hard to find newer games?
where is DiRT? The graphical show piece
how about Call of Juarez.
Since you are testing under Vista, how could you not include the Halo 2 for vista only?

If you could broaden your test base, at least you would look less biased than hand-picking the optimized games for nvidia.

Jumping to clusion base on testing SIX holy games? This is a misleading crap.
Click to expand...

STALKER and Lost Planet aren't optimised for NVIDIA cards. ATI just does those two games poorly. That's hardly the fault of the [H]. Lost Planet in fact is a console port from the Xbox 360 which uses an ATI graphics solution. Yeah, seems really optimised for NVIDIA cards.

As for the sampling, how many games do you need to draw a conclusion. Generally speaking you just need to have a couple OpenGL games and a Direct 3D game and from there you will pretty much be able to predict which will be faster in what games.

The fact is the newer ATI cards suck at most all the games, I doubt a larger sampling would paint a different picture.
 
UrielDagda said:
All I have to say is, ouch. If I were an engineer at ATI right now, I wouldn't be able to show my face in public. This has to be quite embarrassing. It's just an overly huge HTPC card.
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Do you really think the real engineers wanted this to go out the door? This fiasco was not really about the engineers but more about bad management choices. Calling a design engineer a manager is pretty low blow IMO. Sorta like calling all gamers pimply snot nosed losers who's only chance of getting laid is by a chicken. :D
 
bangmal said:
Try testing the newer games or more games
You have been testing the same games over and over and over again.
Stalker and Lost Planet are known that they are optimized for NV cards.
What is your problem? is it that hard to find newer games?
where is DiRT? The graphical show piece
how about Call of Juarez.
Since you are testing under Vista, how could you not include the Halo 2 for vista only?

If you could broaden your test base, at least you would look less biased than hand-picking the optimized games for nvidia.

Jumping to clusion base on testing SIX holy games? This is a misleading crap.
Click to expand...

New Games Used in this Evaluation:

Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion
Burning Crusade expansion for WoW
Lord of the Rings Online
Lost Planet

We've got Halo 2, looking at it, seems very graphically underwhelming

Call of Juarez DX10 patch isn't out yet, game has never been on the top 10 games sells list

Optimized for whatever card is irrelevant, a game is a game is a game, we take that game and figure out what the gameplay experience will be on both platforms
 
meh, don't fall for the flamebaiters ;)

most of what you guys did is what you guys always do, and what gets me is when people always come here trying to prove how you did something wrong, either way I liked the review alot.

Probably one of yours more direct and most understanding reviews, the 2600XT does seem like a good card for a market and I might actually go out and buy one for one of my room mates based on this review. All hes looking for is something to stick in his computer to watch on his 45" TV he just got for his birthday so this would be something nice for him.
 
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