ATI's flagship card fails to perform

The first round of benchmarks for ATI's new line of R600-based cards went rather well. Unfortunately, round two wasn't as kind to them. The guys over at DailyTech were able to pit the ATI flagship Radeon HD 2900 XTX against NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX. The results aren't pretty.

The Radeon HD 2900 XTX is actually very similar to their HD 2900 XT, in fact, they both have identical cores. The most notable difference between the two is the inclusion of DDR4 in the XTX. The specific test board that they used had the memory clocked at 2.02GHz and a core clock of 750MHz. Bear in mind that when the cards are shipped they will likely have different clock settings.

Now on to the bad news. The XTX was beaten by the 8800 GTX in every test they ran. Even worse, in two of the tests the XT actually managed to outperform the XTX. I'd like to blame it on bad drivers, but they were using retail drivers from ATI, not "release candidate" drivers.

I really hope that AMD has something rolled up their sleeve, because these numbers just don't look right. How could your lower-end card actually outperform your flagship card? If these are really the numbers that we're going to see when it launches, I think AMD had better be hitting a pretty low price-point and focus on their mid-range cards if they want to get their sales up.

ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX, Doomed from the Start [via dailytech]