Announced May 15, 2007, the Radeon HD 2600 and 2400 finally make an appearance and thus seal the arrival of the AMD’s and Nvidia’s first DirectX 10 lines. What are the performances of these cards? Has AMD managed to do better than Nvidia, whose GeForce 8600 left something to be desired?
GPUs in 65 nanometers
AMD made the choice to make the transition to 65 nanometers for its first batch of mid- and entry level GPUs, contrary to Nvidia, who took less risks and stayed with the 80 nm process. AMD’s disadvantage is that they arrived a little later on the market, although this is only a difference of two months. In compensation, they benefit from a more modern production process, or in other words, the possibility to more easily raise frequencies, reduce power consumption, and use more transistors (we hope) to offer higher performance GPUs.
AMD insists, moreover, on the fact that they didn’t reduce processing units as much compared to their high end versions. Indeed, Nvidia’s solutions are largely inferior to their high end, and the GeForce 8600 is a fourth of a GeForce 8800, and the GeForce 8500 is only one eighth. In this respect for AMD, the Radeon HD 2600 represents two fifths of a Radeon HD 2900, and the Radeon HD 2400 is also one eighth. So, is there an advantage for the HD 2600 ?
If on first glance we believe this to be true, in looking a little further we have to take into account that the Radeon HD 2900 does not correspond to the same high end as Nvidia’s superior offer. Rather it’s more comparable to the GeForce 8800 GTS. Once we take that figure into account, AMD’s solution becomes less attractive, because it is then the high end that is behind and not the mid rangethat is ahead. Moreover, this mid range has a memory bus that went from 512 to 128 bits, which is an enormous difference compared to what we are used to seeing. It’s the same thing for the entry level which went to 64 bits, while ATI had kept a 128 bit memory bus on its last entry level GPUs.
So, the 2400 and 2600 look less flattering, and we’ve wondered for some time if this will really allow AMD to compete with Nvidia in terms of performances. Indeed, we are forced to realize that this isn’t the case and AMD doesn’t hide the fact that performances are a step below. However, there is still a very attractive price and we can see that they have chosen to attack more on the price level, as well as in video, which will be one of the strong points of these two GPUs.
