14 DAY TRIAL // After much discussion and many rumors flying around on the World Wide Web, Advanced Micro Devices finally announced the official launch of the Radeon HD 2900 Pro range of products that are intended to be used as a bridge between the performance and the mainstream market segments. While these graphics cards are packing some serious performance boosts over other similar solutions, they will only be available in limited quantities and for a short period of time.
''AMD is excited to announce the newest member of its flagship ATI Radeon HD 2900-series, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro. The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro features the powerful next-generation unified shader architecture with 320 unified stream processors, comprehensive DirectX 10 support and built-in HDMI multimedia features for an immersive HD gaming experience,'' a statement by AMD reads and it was cited by the news site xbitlabs.
The Radeon HD 2900 Pro graphics processing unit is based on the same hardware architecture like the HD 2900 XT model as they both are centered around the ATI R600 graphics chip and it comes equipped with 320 unified shader processor, 16 texture processing units, 16 ender back ends and a memory interface 512-bits wide. The major difference between the two graphics processing units is that the Pro version is clocked at only 600MHz unlike the XT model that goes for the higher 742MHz speed.
When it comes to dedicated graphics memory, the Radeon HD 2900 Pro cards are using the same memory interface as the XT models and they are equipped with either 512MB or 1Gb of GDDR3 memory which is clocked at 1600MHz, just a little bit lower than the clock frequency of the memories encountered on the HD 2900 XT versions.
The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro 512MB is expected to sell for around $249, while the 1Gb model is going for a suggested retail price tag of $299. ''The ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro is available today on a limited basis subject to supply constraints'', said the manufacturing company.