Thanks for all the feedback provided: it will be considered when we start to make future reviews.
Due to the fact that ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is a mainstream product that is to stay on the market for a considerable amount of time, we felt that we needed to post a conclusion covering all possible aspects of its usage model. Hence, we had to check all the aspects of its performance before making our final judgment. Due to this, we first published reviews covering media playback and DirectX 10 performance of the RV630 graphics processor and only then released the whole review.
Given that it took us quite some time to create three reviews and due to some other factors, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT review came out later than we would like it to arrive. Nevertheless, we fully believe that our conclusions are totally correct and the review will serve as a guidance for graphics cards’ evaluation for quite some time.
Regarding the Drivers
Due to the out-of-date driver version, we received complaints regarding the outdated benchmark numbers of ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT. From what we have found during benchmarking the graphics card for future reviews, only Half-Life 2, Company of Heroes and Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars have more or less substantial performance increases with the newer drivers. We have reflected that on our performance diagrams. However, this does not dramatically change our conclusion regarding the product (we also added a table to the conclusion for better reference).
Regarding Test Settings
Since the vast majority of today’s games use realistic lighting, detailed textures and high-quality special effects, we do not know why would anyone decrease texture filtering quality to add rather ugly artifacts that were common a decade ago, but cannot be accepted now. We also do not usually decrease image quality settings in games as different settings affect performance of various GPUs differently. Hence, for correct comparison we have to keep the highest possible settings all the time.
Full-scene antialiasing dramatically improves image quality. Given that in the last two years we tested a number of performance-mainstream graphics cards with 256-bit memory bus (ATI Radeon X800 GT, X800 GTO, X1800 GTO, X1900 GT, X1950 Pro, Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS, 7900 GS) and decent performance with FSAA 4x, we have no idea why we have to step back to no-FSAA mode ahead of the ATI RV670 and Nvidia G8M launch, both of which are projected to feature 256-bit memory bus. Moreover, enabling FSAA does not affect relative performance of different products, e.g. if the GeForce 8600 GTS is generally faster than the Radeon HD 2600 XT, then it will remain faster with FSAA activated.
10/02/07 06:38:56 PM]