Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB Preview

Below is the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB, ASUS EAX1950PRO 256MB, and Sapphire Radeon X1800XT 256MB graphics card for a size comparison. The Radeon HD 2900XT is both the longest and heaviest of these graphics cards.

Some of the other technical benefits for the Radeon HD 2900XT include DirectX 10.0 (if you use Microsoft Windows), Shader Model 4.0, 320 stream processors, and 512MB of 512-bit GDDR3 video memory. Sapphire also produces an HD 2900XT graphics card with 1GB of video memory that does perform even faster. Like was the case when previewing the ASUS EAX1300PRO before the ATI R500 Linux (fglrx v8.24.8) driver was released last year, you'll need to wait a bit longer before finding out how the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900XT can perform under Linux. When it comes to the hardware, Sapphire Technology has made a great package following the AMD HD 2900XT reference design and they include a number of extra accessories though not all of them are relevant to Linux users. We'll wait to see how the new Linux driver works before drawing any conclusions about the Radeon HD 2900XT or the R600 series for that matter.

We will be back with our complete findings later this year and in the meantime you can discuss the current ATI/AMD Linux drivers in the Phoronix Forums.