Customer Reviews

Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 512 MB GDDR3 Graphics Card

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I purchased two HD 2900XT cards for a crossfire setup. A HUGE MISTAKE!! I immediately noticed a low frame rate when anti-aliasing was enabled. I tested many games and actually found my old Radeon X1900XTX setup to run faster in several cases. I also noticed severe problems with image quality. Half-life 2, Oblivion and many newer games had blurry HUDs, fuzzy text, washed out textures, some artifacts, rendering errors, objects not rendered properly. To sum it up, it looks TERRIBLE. In comparison, my X1900s had a much sharper IQ. This is unacceptable.

Secondly, the Radeon HD 2900 XT does not have hardware or software HD acceleration. UVD hardware video processing was falsely advertised by AMD for this card. They totally misled customers on this one. I think this whole R600 release is a complete fiasco. I wish I had done more research before wasting $$$ on this flawed product. Don't make the same mistake.

AMD confirmed they used shaders and not ROPs (hardware) to resolve anti-aliasing on the HD 2900XT. This design flaw is causing the poor performances I've seen when enabling AA in games. Using shader AA instead of ROP AA was a poor design decision that no driver updates or patches will ever correct. This piece of hardware is flawed from the start and doomed to a quick death.

Should AMD recall their Radeon HD 2900 XT cards now and offer a replacement product to deceived customers, or better yet, refresh their product line in a couple of months and entice customers to purchase a "working" product next time? I smell Lawsuits waiting to happen....

According to Tom's Hardware, this is one of the most energy wasteful cards you can buy, consuming more power than the rest of the PC (including the monitor!) combined, even at idle. Please boycott this product (and the Geforce 8800 cards) until the vendors start producing cards with more reasonable power consumption. Future generations who have to live on this planet will thank you.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/21/energy-efficient_computing_options/page5.html#single_graphics_cards