A few days ago we posted a review on the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256MB DDR2 offering. This week we are going to be taking a look at its bigger brother the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR3 card. Like the Pro version, the XT supports high definition gaming on Windows Vista with DirectX 10 support, and allows the user to easily upgrade to a CrossFire configuration. The HD2600XT also brings a loaded HD feature-set with it offering support for ATI Avivo HD, HDMI connect ability, HD Audio and Blu-Ray / HD DVD decoding.
First Impression:
The Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT comes packed in a very nice looking box that gives you a good insight into what the box contains. On the front we see the main features of the HD2600 XT card, while the back gives us a brief overview of the card and what it is capable of doing. Across the bottom of the back we can see a few of the awards that Sapphire has received on their products over the last couple of years.
For those that like the goodies that come with video cards, Sapphire will not disappoint you. The Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT comes with a free copy of Valve's The Black Box, this consists of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, and the much anticipated Team Fortress 2 games.
Cracking open the box we will find the Radeon HD2600 XT sandwiched between to layers of foam padding to protect it during shipping. As you can see by the placement of the card in the photo, it can still move around a little.
Under the 2nd layer of foam padding we find the booklets, accessories, and CD's that are included. Top left is the Sapphire manual, top center is a couple of inserts pertaining to the free copy of The Black Box , top right is the 3 CD's that are included. The bottom left shows the cables, adapters and CrossFire bridge that is supplied.
The far left is the installation CD for the Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT, next to it is the full version of 3DMark06, and to the right is a copy of Cyberlinks Power DVD 6.
Below is a full listing of the highlights for the Sapphire Radeon HD2600 XT.
390 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process 128-bit DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface Ring Bus Memory Controller o Fully distributed design with 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture o 120 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
o 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 40 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Physics processing support
Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0 o Shader Model 4.0
o Geometry Shaders
o Stream Output
o Integer and Bitwise Operations
o Alpha to Coverage
o Constant Buffers
o State Objects
o Texture Arrays
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Temporal anti-aliasing
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o Bicubic filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology o Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
o Integrated compositing engine
o High performance dual channel interconnect
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform o Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
o Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
+ Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
o Avivo Video Post Processor
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
o High Quality Video Post Processing
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays
for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI)
or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536
o HDMI output support
+ Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080
+ Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less
audio solution
o Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
+ Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
o Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
PCI Express x16 bus interface OpenGL 2.0 support
