Affordable ATI Radeon HD 2900 Cards

The graphics cards market is almost entirely dominated by Nvidia, the green goblin of the computer industry, at least on the high-end segment. While ATI cards were never far behind and on some occasions, they were taking the lead in the performance and image quality departments, overall, Nvidia is the most important graphics cards manufacturer and vendor with high end graphics chips that are enjoying a lot of popularity.

Traditionally, the high end market for graphics cards is a very pricey one, as one card made by a reputed hardware manufacturer and based on a last generation chip can go for as much as several hundred dollars. This is the opportunity that AMD's graphics division, the formerly independent company ATI, was waiting for as they decided to release top of the line graphics cards that are equipped with all the features required form a high end card but with a smaller price tag. According to the news site xbitlabs ATI is going to launch a line of Radeon HD 2900 Pro and GT graphics solutions that will come with a price tag between $199 and $399.

It is said that those cards will feature reduced ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT technology, but not hard evidence exists yet. The AMD graphics division will have a small launching window if they wish to catch the back to school shopping season. The Radeon 2900s from the Pro and GT lines would not be the first to be based on cut down XT technology as the professional graphics accelerator ATI FireGL V7600 that is already shipping comes with a fully functional ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT/R600 chip with 320 unified shader processing units. The down side of the cut down products is that they feature only a 256 bit wide memory interface and not the fully functional 512 bit wide bus.

The market situation looks a little blue for ATI right now, as the company has no DirectX 10 compliant card in the price segment of $199 and $299 that can compete against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB as well as GeForce 8600 GTS graphics cards. Currently, AMD has a gap of $200 in its DirectX 10 pricing scheme and in order to fill that gap, the company will have to release the code-named RV670 graphics chip that is believed to be aimed at the performance and mainstream levels.