ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Review

The HD 2600 XT is AMD’s new midrange flagship card which is based on the RV630 GPU. This is the first time that a midrange card comes equipped with GDDR4 memory - 256 MB in our case. AMD’s new card comes with features such as DirectX 10 support and full HD video acceleration by dedicated hardware called UVD. But is this enough to beat NVIDIA’s new products?

..AMD’s HD 2600 XT is a solid card that feels quite mature and works rock stable. Performance is a bit less than what I expected, especially to the X1xxx products the speed difference is quite small. On the other hand you get several new features like DirectX 10 support and the wonderful UVD high-definition video decode acceleration. Unlike NVIDIA’s GeForce 8 Series, AMD gives you the whole multimedia package which consists of HDMI + Audio + HDCP.

While gaming performance of the HD 2600 XT is generally a bit slower than the GeForce 8600 GTS, the price is lower as well. In this market segment price is often more important than a few percent more or less performance.

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