AMD plans to launch a completely new DirectX 10 lineup with the flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX. Other models such as the Radeon HD 2900 XT, Radeon HD 2600-series and Radeon HD 2400-series will also join AMD's DirectX 10 family after the initial high-end launches. DailyTech has now published some preliminary ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Performance Benchmarks and compared the ATI card with NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS. The tests were conducted on an Intel D975XBX2 BadAxe2, Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and 2x1GB DDR2-800 MHz. The operating system on the test system was Windows XP, with a fresh install before benchmarking each card. Testing of the AMD ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT was performed using the 8.361 Catalyst RC4 drivers, while the GeForce 8800 GTS used ForceWare 158.19 drivers.

AMD equips the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT with 320 stream processors to take on NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS, which features 96 stream processors. However, AMD and NVIDIA have taken different approaches towards their unified shader designs. AMD pairs the R600 GPU with 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 1.65 GHz across an eight-channel, 512-bit memory interface. In comparison, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS features 640MB of 1.6 GHz GDDR3 memory on a 320-bit memory interface. It's curious to note that for more than 3x the number of stream processors of the 8800 (320 vs. 96), the new ATI card delivers on average roughly 1.5x the performance of the NVIDIA card. As such, I'm very eagerly waiting for Anandtech's detailed study of the R600's architecture when the time comes.