[W1zzard]

Introduction

AMD announced their Radeon HD 2400 Series some time ago together with the 2900 and 2600 products. Now the first cards are available and the benchmarking NDA has expired.
The card is based on the new RV610 GPU which is fully DX10 compatible and has additional features like an integrated tesselator and a UVD HD video decoding engine.

	Radeon HD 2400 Pro	Radeon HD 2400 XT	GeForce 8500 GT	GeForce 8600 GTS	Radeon HD 2600 XT	Radeon HD 2900 XT
Shader units	40	40	16	32	120	320
ROPs	4 x2	4 x2	4	8	4 x2	16 x2
GPU	RV610	RV610	G86	G84	RV630	R600
Transistors	180 M	180 M	210M	289M	390 M	700 M
Memory Size	256 MB	256 MB	256 MB	256 MB	256 MB	512 MB
Memory Bus Width	64 bit	64 bit	128 bit	128 bit	128 bit	512 bit
Core Clock	525 MHz	700 MHz	450 MHz	675 MHz	800 MHz	742 MHz
Memory Clock	400 MHz	800 MHz	400 MHz	1000 MHz	1100 MHz	825 MHz
Price	$59	$79	$85	$175	$149	$399

Complete Specifications

• 180 million transistors on 65nm fabrication process
• 64-bit DDR2/GDDR3 memory interface
• Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
• 40 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
• 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
• Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
• Shader instruction and constant caches
• Up to 16 texture fetches per clock cycle
• Up to 128 textures per pixel
• Fully associative vertex/texture cache design
• DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
• High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
• Fully associative texture & Z/stencil cache designs
• Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
• Lossless Z & stencil compression
• 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
• Physics processing support
• Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10
• Shader Model 4.0
• Geometry Shaders
• Stream Output
• Integer and Bitwise Operations
• Alpha to Coverage
• Constant Buffers
• State Objects
• Texture Arrays
• Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
• Programmable tessellation unit
• Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
• Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
• Anti-aliasing features
• Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 4 samples per pixel)
• Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
• Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
• Temporal anti-aliasing
• Gamma correct
• Super AA (CrossFire configurations only)
• All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
• Texture filtering features
• 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
• 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
• Bicubic filtering
• sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
• Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
• Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
• Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
• CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology
• Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
• Integrated compositing engine
• High performance dual channel interconnect
• ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
• 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
• Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4/DivX video decode acceleration
• Motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform)
• Avivo Video Post Processor
• Color space conversion
• Chroma subsampling format conversion
• Horizontal and vertical scaling
• Gamma correction
• 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
• 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
• Two integrated DVI display outputs
• Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
• Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)1
• Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
• Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
• Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
• HDMI output support
• Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
• Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
• Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
• Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
• Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
• Underscan and overscan compensation
• MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
• VGA mode support on all display outputs
• PCI Express x16 bus interface
• OpenGL 2.0 support

Packaging & Contents

We have not received a final packaging with our sample card. Our package only had the card and a driver CD.

The Card

The design of our 2400 XT sample board looks a bit weird. I assume the PCB design will be changed slightly. When looking closely at the upper part we can see that there are almost no components except for the CrossFire connector and the debug test port. Since the final cards will not use a CrossFire adapter, I assume this design was mainly used for testing and developing the cards.


The back of the card is completely standard, it has two of the four memory chips on it.


The HD 2400 Series is a budget/OEM/office card. Most people in this segment probably have a display with analog input. The DVI port can of course be used with an analog adapter too, or with an HDMI adapter to get HDMI+Audio+HDCP.

A Closer Look

The cooler is a really simple construction. This shows how little heat the RV610 GPU produces. As a matter of fact several manufacturers are already working on completely passive cooling solutions for the HD 2400 Series.


Even though our sample card has a CrossFire connector, the retail cards will come without one. It is not needed anyway because the data can be transferred via the PCI-Express bus without problems. This means that you can just put two 2400 XT cards into your PC, click "Enable CrossFire" and it works without any additional cables or connectors.


The naked card shows that the major components on the card are just GPU and memory.


The DDR2 memory chips are 512 Mbit HY5PS121621C FP-25 chips by Hynix with an access time of 2.5 ns which is 400 MHz.


The GPU is the AMD RV610 revision A14.

Test System

Test System
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ @ 3000 MHz (250x12) (Windsor, 2x 1024 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 ATI Radeon XPRESS 3200
Memory:	2x 1024MB A.DATA DDR2 1066+ CL4
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2
Drivers:	NVIDIA: 94.24 (GeForce 8: 158.22) ATI: Catalyst 7.5 (HD 2400 and HD 2600 with 8.38.9.1 RC2)

• All video card results were obtained on this exact system with the exact same configuration.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing, No anisotropic filtering. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering. Common resolution for most gamer flatscreens today. A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1600 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filter. Highest non-widescreen resolution available to a wide range of users. Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2048 x 1536, 4x Anti-aliasing, 16x anisotropic filter. Highest non-widescreen resolution available to any consumer video card. Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Company Of Heroes

The real-time strategy game Company of Heroes is set during World War II where you take two american companies through several fights all over France to liberate the country from German occupation. Company of Heroes is the first game to use Relic's next-generation engine "Essence Engine" which includes support for HDR lighting, Shader Model 3.0, normal mapping, dynamic lighting and shadows. You are able to zoom in from the tactical view of the battle field to see the individual units fighting. Often you catch yourself admiring the detailed animations of the soldiers while the fight around you is raging. We tested the DX9 version of the game at maximum details.

Far Cry

Far Cry was released in early 2004 by the new development studio Crytek. It quickly became a massive success because it was one of the first titles to take you in a beautiful 3D outdoor world. Far Cry was one of the most demanding games at its time. Even with today's video cards you can still see big differences in frame rates, especially at the higher resolutions.

FEAR

The first person shooter F.E.A.R, developed by Monolith Game Studios, was released in Fall 2005 and has a great 3D engine that uses a large number of shading and shadow effects to accurately model the game world. In addition to that it features a realistic physics engine that lets you interact with many objects in the game world. The game was voted game of the year by several publications.

Prey

Prey is based on a highly modified 3D engine made by id Software. This first person shooter brought a completely new way of gaming to the genre. In many levels you find yourself walking upside down or on the walls. This adds a completely new aspect to the gaming experience in this genre.

Quake 4

The Quake titles are among the most successful first person games. Developed by id Software, the famous game studio that brought you DOOM, you find yourself in a scifi world that is full of aliens and shocking effects. The main focus of the game is the single player story line. Quake 4 puts you on the home planet of the Strogg. In a number of missions you and your fellow marines will encounter all sorts of enemies, including some really huge aliens.

Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory

The Splinter Cell Series is endorsed by popular book author Tom Clancy. In the 2005 title Splinter Cell 3: Chaos Theory you play the NSA agent Sam Fisher who has to use stealth and finesse to make his way through a number of levels mainly set in eastern asia. The game is based on a modified Unreal 2 engine with support for HDR, normal mapping, parallax mapping and soft shadows. A patch added Shader Model 2.0 support for ATI in addition to the Shader Model 3.0 support which was already part of the original shipping game.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Before its release in 2007, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was one of the most hyped games of the last years. This RPG/FPS hybrid game is set a few years in the future, after a nuclear disaster occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The release of radiation causes strange things like mutations in the nearby area. You take the role of a Stalker who seeks fame and riches in the contaminated area around Chernobyl. The game engine features all the latest buzzwords like HDR, bullet physics, skeletal animation, soft shadows and weather effects. Stalker's vast outside world is richly modelled, you can interact with a large number of objects in the game thanks to the physics engine.

Supreme Commander

If you hear people talk about a real-time strategy game with "massive numbers of units fighting" you can be sure they are talking about Supreme Commander. The unofficial successor to the Total Annihilation Series completely redefined some aspects of the RTS genre. In Supreme Commander you can zoom out so far that you can see the whole map on your screen and units are just little blips. This is much needed in fights when several hundred units go at each other. Supreme Commander is also one of the most demanding RTS games with support for up to four CPU cores - a dual-core system with high-end graphics is recommended for optimum game play.

X3

X3 is a space combat/trading simulation game with beautiful graphics. The game world is gigantic and there is always something new to see. Even though the user interface is not that great, the title has found many fans that love to explore the rich content. When you are flying in your spaceship you are sometimes tempted to just stop the action to take a look at the highly detailed ships and planets.

3DMark03

Futuremark Corporation is the number one player in the world of synthetic benchmarking. The 3DMark series is the most popular test suite for video card testing and is used by gamers, overclockers and manufacturers alike to determine how fast their hardware is. Even though it is a few years old, 3DMark03 can easily stress today's video cards.

3DMark05

Another benchmark from Futuremark is 3DMark05 which comes with four completely new game tests that make massive use of shaders and lighting effects. 3DMark05 is a great test for modern video card architectures - in some tests you are often close to the 30 fps mark, below which your games will feel sluggish.

3DMark06

Even though it's based on Futuremark's 3DMark05, the new 3DMark06 adds new tests for Shader Model 3.0 and HDR rendering. It is also the first 3DMark to incorporate a CPU score into the final 3DMark score. All tests have received an overhaul, for example in the Canyon Flight test you can now see beautiful sun glare effects with the help of High Dynamic Range rendering.

Power consumption

Cooling modern video cards is becoming more and more difficult, especially when users are asking for quiet cooling solutions. That's why the engineers are now paying much more attention to power consumption of new video card designs.

Test System
CPU:	AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ @ 3000 MHz (250x12) (Windsor, 2x 1024 KB Cache)
Motherboard:	Sapphire PC-AM2RD580 ATI Radeon XPRESS 3200
Memory:	2x 1024MB A.DATA DDR2 1066+ CL4
Harddisk:	WD Raptor 740ADFD 74 GB
Power Supply:	OCZ GameXStream 700W
Software:	Windows XP SP2

In order to characterize a video card's power consumption, the whole system's mains power draw was measured. This means that these numbers include CPU, Memory, HDD, Video card and PSU inefficiency.

The three result values are as following:

• Idle: Windows sitting at the desktop (1024x768 32-bit) all windows closed, drivers installed.
• Average: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Average of all readings (two per second) while the test was rendering (no title screen).
• Peak: 3DMark03 Nature at 1280x1024, 6xAA, 16xAF. This results in the highest power consumption. Highest single reading

Overclocking

ATI's RV6xx GPUs use a new dynamic clock mechanism that dynamically selects the clock speed based on GPU load. Unlike previous cards this is done completely in hardware by the GPU without any intervention required by the driver. Our 2400 XT has three clock states: Low (110 / 252 MHz), Medium (400 / 300 MHz) and High (700 / 800 MHz). Fan speeds are adjusted by temperature. This means that the card is quiet in 2D mode or when load is low and the fan speed gets ramped up when the card gets hotter and requires additional cooling.

We used ATITool and the AMD GPU clock tool to manually search for the maximum core and memory clocks.



The final overclocks of our card are 756 MHz Core (8 % overclock) and 837 MHz Memory (4.6 % overclock). The original overclocks were somewhat higher but 3D applications kept crashing, even though ATITool said the card is error free. These overclocks are ok but not spectacular.


The temperature controlled fan does a good job at keeping the card cool. Considering the small size of the fan it should be no problem building a passively cooled 2400 XT.

Value and Conclusion

	AMD is targetting the HD 2400 XT at $79. A great price for the feature set the card delivers.
	UVD for Highdef video acceleration Competitive price Quiet - temperature controlled fan Modest power consumption DirectX 10 + Shader Model 4.0 Support CrossFire capable
	Very limited gaming performance
9.0	With a price of only $79 for the XT version and even less for the Pro version, the HD 2400 XT is sitting in a niche that is mainly reserved for office PCs. However, it does include advanced features like DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0 which are probably not going to be used a lot in this performance class. On the other hand if you are in the market for a new card the price difference between X1300 and 2400 XT is so small that you can just get the 2400 XT for the additional features at almost no extra cost. Unfortunately for AMD, NVIDIA GeForce 8 products offer more performance for just a little bit of extra money. Users of media PC systems will love this card because it comes with the UVD HD video accleration feature that greatly reduces CPU load when decoding HD-DVD and Bluray movies. Being able to have HDMI + HDCP + Audio all over one cable makes the card even more useful for HTPCs. The temperature controlled fan is a welcome feature to keep the annoying fan noise down.