Rumour control: New Radeon as fast as 2900XT, but half the price

Posted at: 4:23am 1st October 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

RV670 chip could offer the same performance as the 2900XT, but with a cheaper price and lower power consumption

It consumed more power than the Death Star and it crawled like a three-legged hamster when you enabled standard anti-aliasing on it too. The Radeon HD 2900XT was pretty disappointing when it came out, but the word is that a forthcoming GPU from AMD will solve the price and power issues, and offer the same level of performance for significantly less money.

An anonymous source in the industry has told Custom PC that cards based on AMD’s new RV670 chip will be ‘as fast’ as the 2900XT, but will be ‘half the price.’ Our source also described the forthcoming GPU as ATi’s ‘last chance product,’ implying that it could make or break AMD's graphics division.

The folks over at DailyTech claim that the GPU will have the same bank of 320 stream processors, but they will be clocked at 600MHz rather than 742MHz as they are on the 2900XT. However, the GPU will also be produced on a 55nm process (although many sources claim that it will be 65nm). This alone will solve the power-consumption issues, and this is backed up by the photos of a test card that show only one PCI-E power connector. However, the test cards that have been seen so far apparently only come with 256MB of 900MHz (1,800MHz effective) GDDR3 memory, as opposed to the 512MB/1GB configurations of GDDR3 and GDDR4 memory found on 2900XT cards.

It's difficult to see how a card with less memory and a lower-clocked GPU will be as fast as a 2900XT, but it's possible that the new chip will offer some new enhancements as well, which could boost the speed.

The GPU is also rumoured to support DirectX 10.1, and will be PCI-E 2.0 compliant. Meanwhile, another source inside the industry hinted to Custom PC that the cards may be available in mid-November, which could be why Nvidia is apparently considering launching a similar mid-range card in the same timeframe.

It looks as though interesting times could be ahead in the mid-range graphics business. Watch this space.