14 DAY TRIAL // I have to say that AMD's craziness has absolutely no limits when it comes to the VGA land. Ever since they acquired Ati, it seems that the IT giant has lost every sense of direction and now acts just like a dizzy fly. Each direction is just as good as any other and if you can even make some money it's even better. Or not.
Take the 4x4 platform for example. Announced as the next CPU platform, the socket 1207 line proved to be a disaster both in terms of performance and revenues. And to make things even worse, the HD 2900 XT series is by no means a menace for the 8800 GTX series, being about as fast as a 640MB GTS (even slower in some games).
Perhaps the 1GB GDDR4 can fix that. Or not. In any case, AMD has done it again with the 2900 XT not being able to accelerate HD content. The lack of UVD support is indeed a bad thing especially if you look at all the publicity that pointed out to that technology as being one of the strongest selling points. So what can you do if you're caught lying again?
You can always roll out a cheaper version of the 2900 series (namely the 2400 and 2600 series) which has a functional UVD module. AMD said that they have started shipping large numbers of HD2400 and HD2600 graphics chips to all their major partners. The list is pretty long but it contains a lot of heavy names such as Sapphire, GeCube, Power Color, Asus, Club 3D MSI and HIS.
With the arrival of the new mainstream products, AMD also wants to clarify the UVD issue. Meaning that they did not introduce the UVD feature in the 2900 XT because HD support was not meant to be a default feature of such a "high-end" product. Ya don't say?
Well, perhaps one should take a closer look at the R600 GPU. Because I bet they will find an UVD disabled module in there somewhere. And that couldn't have been good for business. All in all, if you want UVD, all 2300, 2400 and 2600 HD series have it and it's working like a charm. Expect the final products to be available in stores in about 1 month.