Test System

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

The following resolutions were tested per benchmark:

• 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.

We tested the Radeon HD 2900 XT with ATI's 8.37 driver which is the official benchmarking driver for all R600 reviews. We tried 8.38 and 8.39 too, but they offer only +1% to - 1% performance difference which is within the margin of error of the benchmarks. The only gains you will see in extreme HD resolutions with highest AA and AF settings.

We did not test any DX10 titles because there are none available than can be used for competitive benchmarking. The Call Of Juarez DX10 demo works on ATI, but is having issues on NVIDIA hardware. Other than that there is not a single shipping title with DX10, so coming to a DX10 performance conclusion is not possible.