New ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series Graphics Cards--Will the Mac get one?
ATI claims that the series boasts many firsts for the graphics industry, including a powerful second-generation Unified Shader Architecture (USA), a 512-bit memory bus designed for full performance high dynamic range (HDR) rendering, and new Unified Video Decoder (UVD) technology for high-fidelity HD media playback. The mid-range and entry-level GPUs are the first graphics products in the industry to use an energy-efficient 65nm process technology to achieve silent, passive cooling and lower power consumption. The high-end GPU uses an 80nm process, still smaller than the previous 90nm process.
The current top of the line ATI graphics card for the Mac is the X1900 for both the Mac Pro and PowerMac G5. Here is how the new HD 2900 compares on some features with the X1900:
|
Feature
|
X1900 (Mac)
|
HD 2900 (PC)
|
|
.
|
||
|
Transistors (106)
|
384
|
700
|
|
Fab. Process (nm)
|
90
|
80
|
|
Shaders
|
48 pix, 8 vertex
|
320 stream
|
|
Calculation Precision (bit)
|
128
|
128
|
|
Memory Interface
|
256-bit 8 channel
|
512-bit 8 channel
|
|
Anti-Aliasing
|
6X
|
24X
|
|
Anisotropic Filtering
|
16X
|
16X
|
|
Bus
|
PCIe
|
PCIe
|
|
API
|
DirectX 9, OpenGL 2.0
|
DirectX 10, OpenGL 2.0
|
An AMD/ATI press release claims the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT for Windows is available now for an SRP of $399 but it is not offered on the ATI online store as yet.
As for the Mac, we can only wait and see what Apple may offer as an OEM graphics card in future Mac Pros and MacBook Pros. One thing that we had really hoped for with Apple's conversion to Intel processors is that cutting-edge graphics cards would be more immediately available for the Mac but this has yet to materialize. [Bill Fox]
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