Posted:2007-06-28 By Video card review Number of View:57095
RADEON HD 2600 XT AND HD 2400 XT
REVIEW AND BENCHMARK
By :Video card review
Posted:2007-06-28
xtreview is your : Video card - cpu - memory - Hard drive - power supply unit source
The AMD r6xx architecture was announced during May, in the first stage only solution from upper price range on base of chip r600 was availble, and rest video card on the base of the standardized architecture r6xx were postponed for later period.
Somewhere after 2005 , ATI company gradually began to iprove its positions in competitive activity with NVIDIA. The 2001-2005 NVIDIA domination , was broken by ATI with the release of video chip r3xx and the corresponding video card RADEON 9x00 , NVIDIA company at those time make a big mistake with unsuccessful geForce FX. And Since , somewhere in 2005 , Both ATi and Nvidia controlled the market , we have finnaly two strong competitors . ATI just like Nvidia presented
power full product based on chips r5xx and Nvidia Geforce 6 and 7 .But with the realeae of G80 Nvidia take again the lead, ATI was purchached by AMD and next genration R600 Chip has a long delay in their annocement, Today HD 2900 XT are already availble ,and Now AMD will present mid and low end video chip based on R600.
The basic difference in RV630 and RV610 chips from the top-en r600 is the 65 nm production technology , which allow to reduce the prime cost, completely great for the inexpensive products, and which probably, influenced the annocement periods
of the corresponding solutions.
Graphic card RADEON HD 2600 PRO and HD 2600 XT Specifications
Chip Code name RV630
Technology : 65 nm
390 million transistors
Standardized architecture with stream processors working for vertex and pixel shader
DirectX 10 hardware support , including new shader models : shader model 4.0, geometry generation and stream output
128- bit memory system bus , two controllers with 64 bits width
Core Frequency 600-800 MHz
120 scalar ALU with floating point (integral and floating , support FP32 within the standard IEEE 754)
2 textural blocks, support FP16 and FP32 textures components
16 blocks addressing textural
40 blocks sample textural
8 blocks bilinear filtration with the possibility of FP16 textures filtering at full speed and trilinear and anisotropic filtration support for all textural sizes
Possibility of dynamic branchings in pixel and vertex shader
4 blocks ROP
Record results to 8 buffers simultaneously (MRT)
Integrated support of two RAMDAC, two ports dual link DVI, HDMI, HDTV
RADEON HD 2600 XT Specifications
Core Frequency : 800 MHz
Quantity of stream processors : 120
Quantity of textural units : 8, blending blocks - 4
Theoretical maximum fill rate paiting speed 3.2 Gpixel per second
Theoretical textures fill rate speed : 6.4 Gpixel per second
CrossFire port
System bus : PCI-Express 16x
Two DVI- I Dual link port, resolution up to 2560x1600
TV-Out, HDTV-Out, support HDCP, HDMI adapter
Energy consumption approximately 45 W
Recommended price $129/$149
RADEON HD 2600 PRO Specifications
Core Frequency : 600 MHz
Quantity of stream processors : 120
Quantity of textural units : 8, blocks blending - 4
Effective memory frequency : 800 MHz (2 * 400 MHz)
Memory type : DDR2
Memory volume : 256 megas-byte
Memory bandwidth :12.8 GB/s
Theoretical maximum fill rate paiting speed 2.4 Gpixel per second
Theoretical textures fill rate speed : 4.8 Gpixel per second
CrossFire
System bus : PCI-Express 16x
Two DVI- I Dual link port, resolution up to 2560x1600
TV-Out, HDTV-Out, support HDCP, HDMI adapter
Energy consumption less than 45 W
Recommended price $99
Graphic accelerators RADEON HD 2400 PRO and HD 2400 XT
Chip Code name RV610
Technology 65 nm
180 million transistors
Standardized architecture with stream processors working for vertex and pixel shader
DirectX 10 hardware support , including new shader models : shader model 4.0, geometry generation and stream output
memory system bus , one controllers with 64 bits width
Core Frequency 525-700 MHz
40 scalar ALU with floating point (integral and floating , support FP32 within the standard IEEE 754)
1 textural blocks, support FP16 and FP32 textures components
8 blocks bilinear filtration with the possibility of FP16 textures filtering at full speed and trilinear and anisotropic filtration support for all textural sizes
Possibility of dynamic branchings in pixel and vertex shader
4 blocks ROP
Integrated support of two RAMDAC, two ports dual link DVI, HDMI, HDTV
RADEON HD 2400 XT Specifications
Core Frequency : 700 MHz
Quantity of stream processors : 40
Quantity of textural units : 4, blocks blending - 4
Effective memory frequency : 1600 MHz (2 * 800 MHz)
Memory type : DDR2/GDDR3
Memory volume : 256 megas-byte
Memory bandwidth :12.8 GB/s
Theoretical maximum fill rate paiting speed 2.8 Gpixel per second
Theoretical textures fill rate speed : 2.8 Gpixel per second
CrossFire
System bus : PCI-Express 16x
Two DVI- I Dual link port, resolution up to 2560x1600
TV-Out, HDTV-Out, support HDCP, HDMI adapter
Energy consumption approximately 45 W
Recommended price $79
RADEON HD 2400 PRO Specifications
Core Frequency : 525 MHz
Quantity of stream processors : 40
Quantity of textural units : 4, blocks blending - 4
Effective memory frequency : 800 MHz (2 * 400 MHz)
Memory type : DDR2
Memory volume : 128/256 megas-byte
Memory bandwidth :6.4 GB/s
Theoretical maximum fill rate paiting speed 2.1 Gpixel per second
Theoretical textures fill rate speed : 2.1 Gpixel per second
CrossFire
System bus : PCI-Express 16x
Two DVI- I Dual link port, resolution up to 2560x1600
TV-Out, HDTV-Out, support HDCP, HDMI adapter
Energy consumption less than 25 W
Recommended price $59
There is Some special features : the standardized super-scalar architecture, programmed hardare tesselator, the improved support of video decoding with avivo HD, native crossFire support . The architecture of new chips is standardized, they all possess the valuable support Of directX10 .
Architecture
In the past article, dedicated to the announcement of r6xx architecture and the release of RADEON HD 2900 XT, we in detail described about all architectural special features of the new directX 10 video chips from AMD company , in this review , there will be only their brief description.
R6xx architecture combines in itself some solutions from previous: R5xx and Xenos (video chip of console microsoft xbox 360) with different update: the powerful flows dispatcher , super-scalar architecture shader processors . The schematics of chips RV630 and RV610 appear as follows:
RV630 is differed from R600 only in terms of quantity of stream processor : ALU, ROP, TMU, all the rest is smilar . In RV610 the differences, is not limited to the stream processor number but also to the removed future : there is no hierarchical Z- buffer, there is no second level textural cache, and only level combines the caching of vertex and pixel data. Basic changes: the number of shader processors in RV630 is reduced to 24
(120 processors) and in RV610 to 8 (40 processors), number of texturing blocks to 8 and 4, respectively, and blocks ROP in low-end chips on four.
So we have :
ATI RADEON HD 2400 XT (RV610), 256MB GDDR3 (64 bit), 700/700/1600 MHz, 40 stream processors/4 TMUs/4 ROPs : $59-69;
ATI RADEON HD 2600 PRO (RV630), 256/512MB GDDR2/e (128 bit), 600/600/800 MHz, 120 stream processors/8 TMUs/4 ROPs : $99-119;
ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT (RV630), 256/512MB GDDR3 (128 bit), 800/1400 MHz, 120 stream processors/8 TMUs/4 ROPs : $129;
ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT (RV630), 256/512MB GDDR4 (128 bit), 800/2200 MHz, 120 stream processors/8 TMUs/4 ROPs : $169;
We have five video card: 2 reference card, one from Sapphire, one from TUL and one from HIS.
Let us immediately check those video card with RivaTuner :
RADEON 2400 XT
RADEON 2600 PRO
RADEON 2600 XT
ATI RADEON 2600
XT (RV630) 256MB GDDR4 PCI- E
Fairly complicated and heavy construction, the radiator is made from copper .
GPU:RADEON HD XT (RV630)
Interface:PCI-Express of x16
Working Frequencies GPU (ROPs/shaders): 800/800 (rating 800/800 MHz)
Width of the system bus of exchange with memory: 128bit
Memory system bus Width of the of exchange with : 128bit
Number of vertex processors: -
Number of pixel processors: -
Number of stream processors: 120
Number of textural processors: 8
Number Of rOPs: 4
Sizes: 170x100x32 mm
PCB Color : dark-blue.
RAMDACs/TDMS: integrated in GPU.
Output : 2xDVI (1xHDMI through adapter), TV- out.
VIVO: no
TV-out: integrated in GPU.
Support multiprocessor work: CrossFire (Software).
This video card has 256 MB GDDR2 memory , placed in eighth microcircuits on the face and back sides PCB.
Memory Microcircuits are from qimonda (Infineon) (GDDR2). Access time in memory microcircuits is equal to 2.0ns, which corresponds to the frequency 500 (1000) MHz.
PowerColor RADEON 2600 PRO (RV630) 256MB GDDR2 PCI- E
The card series 2600 PRO generally need a simple cooler ..
Support multiprocessor work: CrossFire (Software).
This video card has 256 MB GDDR3 memory , placed in 4- X microcircuits on the face and back sides PCB.
Memory Microcircuits are from hynix (GDDR3). Access time is equal to 1.1ns, which corresponds to the frequency 900 (1800) MHz.
It is worthwhile to note that the design of most expensive card - 2600 xt with GDDR4 memory is considerably more complex, probably due to the complex power microcicuit .
We should note the valuable HDMI support (in 2600 video card family ); therefore those video accelerator are supplied their own audio- codec, whose trasfarer sound and video through the special adapter DVI-to-HDMI, supplied with the card.
Installation and drivers
Test Configuration :
Computer on base Of intel core2 duo (775 Socket)
processor intel core2 duo extreme x6800 (2930 MHz) (L2=4096K);
Motherboard EVGA nForce 680i SLI on chipset NVIDIA nForce 680i;
Operating system Windows XP SP2 directX 9.0c; Windows vista directX 10;
Monitor dell 3007WFP(30 ).
Drivers ATI version CATALYST 7.6; NVIDIA version 160.02.
Synthetic tests
We used the following video cards
RADEON HD 2900 XT
RADEON HD 2600 XT
RADEON HD 2600 PRO
RADEON HD 2400 XT
NVIDIA geForce 8600 GT
NVIDIA geForce 8500 GT
Pixel filling and pixel shader test
The values are close to the theoretical maximum, NVIDIA chips appear rather better, and under more severe conditions they begin lag strongly . According to our samples textural speed test , AMD chips
are faster , if we compare GeForce 8500 GT with HD 2600 PRO and GeForce 8600 GT with HD 2600 XT.
The second synthetic test Of rightMark measures the filling speed , in it we see approximately the same situation . In cases with superimposed textures NVIDIA chips have the best results.
Beginning from two textures , situation with RV630 and G84 is equalized, and further AMD leaves forward. The same can be said also about HD 2600 PRO and GeForce 8500 GT.
And this time of there are no changes, FFP and shader version 2.0 work approximately equally (probably, FFP is emulated by effective shader) on all video cards, all thoroughly tested solutions show identical figure to the previous results.
Pixel shaders Test
The first group pixel shader is too simple for contemporary video chips , It includes different versions pixel programs of the comparatively low complexity: 1.1, 1.4 and 2.0.
Certainly, these tests are too simple for G8x and R6xx and cannot show, on what the standardized architectures are capable. In the simplest tests the performance is limited by textural samples and fill rate; therefore mid-end solution from AMD and NVIDIA show close results, and here in only more complex PS 2.0 tests , RV630 show better result .
In more dependant on the texturing rate test with the procedural water visualization ,the GeForce 8600 GT and HD 2600 XT are again very close. HD 2900 XT is naturally, far in front, but difference with RV630 does not reach two times. GeForce 8500 GT sequential time is strongly slower than HD 2600 PRO, being inferior even than HD 2400 XT.
All inexpensive card show considerably lower results, as it was expected. Although RV630 is faster more than twice of its compititor and this is good result.
Conclusions on synthetic tests
R6xx architecture differs in terms of high computational performance, it is aimed at contemporary and future 3d applications with a large quantity of complex shader with all types. The high efficiency of universal processors and their comparatively large number make even possible for inexpensive chips to show a good result in all synthetic tests, especially in the geometric and complex pixel. It is important to note that the advantage of AMD chips over competing solution increase
with high load, if under simple conditions the corresponding NVIDIA solutions can be equal in performance ,then in more complex scene the advantage passes to AMD video card .
The Video card RADEON HD 2600 and HD 2400 in the versions XT and PRO showed very good results in our synthetic tests, they clearly exceed as a whole the corresponding to them at the given moment on price NVIDIA solution . Practically in all tests HD 2600 XT win over GeForce 8600 GT, and HD 2600 PRO proved to be clearly faster than GeForce 8500 GT.
Gaming test HD 2600 XT & Pro AND HD 2400 Pro & XT
We used :
Splinter cell chaos theory v.1.04 (Ubisoft) : directX 9.0, shaders 3.0 (with HDR and without HDR), maximum graphic.
Call Of juarez (Techland/ubisoft) : directX 9.0, shaders 3.0 (HDR), demo , maximum quality.
FarCry 1.4 (beta) (Crytek/UbiSoft), DirectX 9.0, shaders 2.0b/3.0 (with HDR and without HDR), research level demo (Very high quality , HDR was set to HDRRendering=1 )
Company Of heroes (Relic entertainment/THQ) : directX 9.0, shaders 2.0, maximum quality.
3DMark06 1.02 (FutureMark) — directX 9.0c,
RightMark 3d : directX, synthetic benchmark, Shader 2.0/2.0b/3.0.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 1.003 (GSC game world/THQ) : directX 9.0, maximum quality ( DYNAMIC ILLUMINATION IS SWITCHED OFF, since it causes strong load on CPU
instead of GPU).
FarCry, Research (No HDR)
Sapphire and HIS 2600 PRO show good result due to high clock frequency
FarCry, Research (HDR)
Situation here became better, since this regime strongly decreased the performance of competitors;.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
F.E.A.R.
Only the overclocked 2600 PRO showed a good result and slight superiority.
Splinter cell chaos Of theory (No HDR)
This game, actively use sheder and 2600- series demonstrated a worthy picture .
Splinter cell chaos theory (HDR)
Picture is analogous.
Call Of juarez
Company Of heroes
Serious sam II (No HDR)
Again a game, which requires besides the shader rapidity, a powerful textural block, which is completely weak in 2600 family.
Serious sam II (HDR)
Prey
3DMark05: MARKS
3DMark06: SHADER 2.0 MARKS
HEre is a synthetic tests, witch clearly make high load on shader, again you see the advantage of HD 2600 - series. As a whole, we obtained one additional confirmation , greater shader use will be in the advantages of AMD video cards.
Conclusions
It is evident according to the results of synthetic tests that the new standardized architecture from AMD came out powerful, aimed at complex calculations. The video card RADEON HD 2600 and HD 2400 in the XT and PRO versions show very good results in synthetic tests. However, in real gaming applications the situation proved to be not so good.
ATI RADEON HD 2400 XT (RV610)-
ery cheap solution for those users, which just need a simple video card. . HD 2400 supports DX10 and Posses a new engine UVD, this card is capable to decod HD video, converting computer in home cinema.
ATI RADEON HD 2600 PRO (RV630)- very good and contemporary solution for its money. Competitor GeForce 8500 GT. Tests showed that the product has large potential in applications, where we deal with shader calculation.
ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT (RV630)- high price with low performance , its price is compared to 8600 GT, witch win in most case
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