It's time for ATI to put their money where their mouth is, because there have been just too many, rogue testing going on with their "still unreleased, under NDA" graphics cards. I realize that these are just engineering samples, whose features and performances don't reflect the ones of the finished product, but so far, all of the products I've seen that were engineering samples behaved a lot better than the final product.

In this case it means that what we have seen so far is the best of what these cards could offer, but then again I could stand corrected. This being said, I pity AMD for dragging along ATI into this because it seems that both of these companies' misfortunes have joined forces and created a big hurricane of problems that is swiping everything in its path, draining their money as it moves along.

It seems the guys over at Anandtech.com have gotten their hands on the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX and tested it, after finishing up with the tests on ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT some time ago. This new series of tests went on to prove that NVIDIA's 8800GTX overpowered the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX, in some cases too badly to mention. But I will give out some of the numbers the cards scored, in HL2 Episode One, 8800GTX got 157.1FPS, while 2900 XTX got 117.9FPS at 1280x1024. Even when the resolution got pushed up to 1920x1200, in Company of Heroes 8800GTX got 80FPS while 2900 XTX got 53.2FPS.

These numbers could be taken and broken into little arguments such as "the drivers were to blame", "the cards were engineering samples" a.s.o., but the biggest argument I could bring at the present time is that the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTX has a problem right now, which I've discussed about a while ago. As more and more benchmarks appear on the Internet, it's hard to convince even the most hardcore enthusiasts that these graphics card will have that extra edge, not to mention normal users. So marketing genies should click their heels three times and wish their way out of this one, because it seems praying is all they've got left.