Information has reached us that the 1GB GDDR4 version of the Radeon HD 2900XT is going to be available from next month. We don’t have a lot of details at this moment, but at least we can tell you that these cards aren’t vapour ware. The other good news is that the 1GB GDDR4 version will be a 9-inch card, not the 12.4-inch cards as earlier rumours speculated on. However, the 12.4-inch cards are still likely to end up in various systems from the large system integrators, such as Dell, HP and Fujitsu-Siemens. There is still no word if the XTX cards will appear or not, but maybe these new 1GB GDDR4 cards will be clocked higher than the current crop of HD 2900XT cards. We’ll bring you more info as we have it.

We understand why AMD doesn't allow to sell cards like HD 2900 XT 1GB. Even after our first article of this series it was clear that the problem was not in memory capacity - 512 MB of memory was quite sufficient even for top graphics cards. There is nothing wrong with memory bus width either. The problem is in the core.

Our tests proved that the first driver bundled with the first card sample significantly raised performance at the expense of other card features. By "other" we mean antialiasing. Alas, there is evidently a bug in the GPU, since it does not allow the core to process AA as it would normally do. But the idea was brilliant! Expand the memory bus to 512 bit, so that AA is processed almost for free! Pity, but we can already state the fact that the card does not need 512 bits of bandwidth, because it's not utilized at 100%. The company got around this bug rather smartly - drivers are used to force ALUs process AA. That is, AA is actually emulated, which takes up much shader resources and affects overall speed - all our tests prove it.