AMD pushes Radeon HD 2400 & 2600 GPU’s

Mathew Everett (Sledgehammer70) AMD has been very down in the graphics market & Nvidia has been taking it to them hard on the high-end. But with today’s news Nvidia's mid range 8 series has a few contenders.

June 11, 2007 12:46 PM ET in News, ,

AMD/ATI has been working on the 2xxx series for a very long time. With considerable delays and numerous aborted lists of specifications, the glimmer of hope seems to be fading. The market has been over-saturated with the NVIDIA 8-series GPU’s and now it finally has some competition. The ATI Radeon HD 2400 and ATI Radeon HD 2600-series GPUs have started to ship in mass quantities and should appear on shelves at both eTailers and retailers within the next week or two.

Both GPUs feature AMD’s UVD (Unified Video Decoder) technology. UVD is a hardware feature that offloads video decoding from the CPU to the GPU to help improve high-def video playback. UVD is designed to be used in a range of video applications such as watching Blu-ray, HD DVD or standard definition movies, according to AMD.

Expect to see benchmarks on these GPUs in head to head battles with NVIDIA’s 8600 & 8400 series of GPUs. While the X2900XT, at a higher pricepoint than the 640MB 8800GTS, loses in the benchmark races, it remains to be seen if the same will hold true for these new boards. Time will tell!

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10 Comments:

  1. primesuspect
    11 Jun '07, 12:53 pm

    Hmmm... If I could get an AGP version of the low end card I could perhaps squeeze some extra life out of my Athlon 2400-based HTPC... The CPU is a little long in the tooth and cannot decode H.264 in realtime. If I could offload that to the GPU, I wouldn't have to upgrade the whole machine...

    Probably wishful thinking. I am pretty sure there won't be an AGP version, will there?

  2. Sledgehammer70
    11 Jun '07, 12:59 pm

    From what I know, both the ATI brand and GeForce brand are coming out with AGP versions of the 8 & 2x00 series of cards... when? who knows...

  3. primesuspect
    11 Jun '07, 1:24 pm

    So honestly, do you think the HD 2400 budget card would be able to offload the decoding of H.264 in realtime on an older PC? This would be much cheaper than upgrading the whole box

  4. Thrax
    11 Jun '07, 1:56 pm

    Yeah. That's ATi's big goal with the project.

  5. primesuspect
    11 Jun '07, 2:32 pm

    Is this the same thing as AVIVO? I couldn't find any AGP AVIVO cards

  6. Thrax
    11 Jun '07, 2:35 pm

    It's the successor to AVIVO.

  7. primesuspect
    11 Jun '07, 2:37 pm

    Okay let me rephrase this into a question: Would AVIVO also offload decoding to the GPU?

  8. Thrax
    11 Jun '07, 2:53 pm

    Yeah, but not with the same capacity as UVD. It's not really until the GeForce 7xxx/ATi 19xx series that CPU-offloading got good; let me put it that way.

  9. Sledgehammer70
    11 Jun '07, 2:57 pm

    Yes Thrax is right... UVD is much better at it than AVIVO... I would say the new tech gave about a 30-40% increase in performance...

  10. zero.counter
    13 Jun '07, 1:42 am

    Can't wait till the reviews...

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