Daily Tech has posted a news item about the upcoming R600 cards from ATI. They claim to have been able to benchmark the HD 2900 XT with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory at 1.65GHz on a 512 bit memory interface. The R600 is also believed to have a total of 320 stream processors, where the nVidia 8800 GTS has 96.
They have tested the card against a 8800 GTS 320 MB, on a resolution of 1280 x 1024. Overall the card performs better than the 8800 GTS, the difference hovers between 2% and 20% in favour of the HD 2900 XT. The complete set of benchmarks and the results can be found here .
The R600 cards will be released somewhere mid-may, according to Daily Tech, and will come in low budget, mid-range and high-end varieties. The high-end models will be available as the tested HD 2900XT with 512MB of GDDR3, and as HD 2900 XTX with 1GB of GDDR4. Prices are supposed to be slightly cheaper than the 8800 GTS 640MB cards, that now retail for around US$ 449,-.
