The Graphics Card that RUINED AMD...

it's been years since we looked at amd's first Flagship graphics card only this time we've got more time on our side and we're taking a look to find out is this where it all went [Music] wrong right right so way back in 2018 we took a look at the radian 2900 XT amd's first graphics card since the Takeover of ATI and we did have a decent look over the card and an array of benchmarks but it's right about time we did the a bit more Justice and take a look at the card not just by itself because at the time it was an okay budget proposition but with some up-to-date drivers some extra benchmarks and find out nearly 20 years on from its original release how far has AMD come for those of you looking to grab one how well do they perform today and in the context of history is this the start of all of amd's problems so while we give this relatively ancient little card bit of a cleanup I'm going to recap the history real fast the original video is still up but it does have some production problems and we've come a long way since then I mean I think that was mostly shot in a Nexus 6 and you know this card deserves a video given the history it has released in 2007 the card was initially delayed for months see this was an ERA where things changed for AMD they had just bought ATI who up until this point they've been doing a rather successful job keeping things under control in their end of the market they had their their legendary 9000 Series which sprung them into the mainstream and with minor revisions going forward they were safely doing a good job outpacing Nvidia I mean they'd even got themselves into the Xbox 360 which was a lot of people's first experience into the world of HD graphics and one that I still remember fondly today I remember being blown away by seeing the graphics on the Xbox 360 and the power behind that was from ATI now this mention of the Xbox 360 is exactly where this card come stemming from something that we will eventually cover in its own video however they couldn't just release that as its own card being the strange Contraption it was but time was ticking and although they may have been responsible for DX 10 over on console on PC there was already only one option nvidia's legendary 8000 series which they'd already showcased the previous year in 2006 directx10 unified shaders new SLI support they were making a comeback of obscene proportions and to WS the end of the year they' solidified this defeat with the release of the 8,800 series a name that virtually everyone here will know and they did it they knocked ATI now AMD off the top spot with what appeared to be no hope of coming back benchmarks even included halflife 2 being shown off at 2560 by 1600 and that was in 2006 that is a huge resolution that people aren't even managing today and they were showing that off in 2006 to make matters worse people were expecting big things from AMD here given they just bought out ATI you know they've made a killing with the aflon 64 series which until a couple of weeks ago I had really tested and that stuff was absolutely insane so people were expecting big things and the issue was there were months and months of delays and Nvidia wanted to rub that in a little bit by offering the new 8,800 Ultra meaning AMD wasn't just having to compete with a card from 6 months ago they had a fresh Flagship to compete against while having no card on the market until eventually in mid2 2007 we saw it the 2900 XT and things well they didn't look good only slightly faster than the cheaper Nvidia budget offering and slower than the GTX which was the flagship from 6 months prior there was very little going for the card prices were quickly slashed and AMD was having to sell these things for I'm guessing a relatively Hefty loss taking the crown for price to Performance because of this but a scene dominated by who performs best that seemed to be a crown they wouldn't be able to shift for years hoping to claw by with features and pricing in mind the card was never too awful when it came to things like media decoding and even had Advanced features like tessalation early on which did suffer with adoption and by the time it was adopted performed pretty terribly on AMD cards until at least the R9 285 years and years later there was some fun forms of antialising going on with cfaa which offered even quicker performance because msaa tanks performance on a card like this but you know it resulted in some slightly muddier looking games according to reviewers of the time personally I never saw anything like that but then again the ERA this was reviewed in every game came with a brown beige filter covering most games so uh they looked pretty muddy the moment you booted them up unfortunately Honestly though you could go on about this card for eons about the strange design choices The Brute performance everything like that to more or less sum it up after years and years of ATI success it seemed a dead ended been reached and I doubt their takeover from AMD was entirely responsible but for your first line of graphics cards it certainly doesn't look like the best start and that 8000 series was seriously stiff competition but to today in 2024 the history is behind us and just how well does the card perform with the latest titles the AAA Classics and then some good old retro gaming but before we get into that though this thing was meant to be a flagship and despite the story there is still quite a lot going on behind the Shroud because brute forcing power is something that started here and doesn't seem to be something AMD has dropped for a long [Music] time released in May of 2007 the radiant 2900 XT was in many ways a complete Overkill card complete with 320 cores 16 tmus 16 RS it even had 1 GB of gddr4 communicating over a massive 512-bit memory bus but it was the start of the terascale architecture something I have very mixed feelings about in most forms it does support directx10 has support for open G 4 up to a certain points and all of this comes at a price where you know Brute Force Power you know just everything about this card seems excessive and even the power consumption is slightly excessive with 170 Watts under complete full load during my testing still that's a lot of power in both ways for a card with such a troubled history you can pick them up relatively cheap now and a lot cheaper than their 8,000 series equivalents which people have now started scalping but uh anyway [Music] we're running this with a ryzen 7 3700 x 32 GB of ddr4 RAM and that's more than enough to see the performance we can get out of this thing I've tested the card with the latest drivers and some other drivers later on in the video to see where performance lies in the modern day as getting drivers onto this thing it can be a nightmare I've never been a fan of Terror scale and it took me a while to actually get the latest drivers on here the ones that come with the operating system I'll speak more about them later but realistically your best choice is the final 13.4 beta drivers that we're using here so the last ones released from AMD so why didn't we get around to finding out just how a card with such a notoriously troubled history performs in the benchmarks starting off our benchmarks we have black Mesa running here in high definition 720p with a mixture of medium and high settings mostly leaning towards the higher end of settings actually here with an average of 48 fps we could go over this and lower than this in certain areas mostly outdoor areas actually which proved to be one of the areas the card struggled with most but generally we hovered around this figure even in areas full of particle effects and explosions it wasn't all sunshine and Roses though no far from it the game would crash constantly unless you started it and then proceed to change it between borderless full screen and then back to exclusive full screen and you couldn't just leave it in borderless either because CU otherwise it wouldn't utilize the graphics card and you'd see about 15 FPS so not an ideal situation but once you had it up and running I got a bit carried away playing this it was actually very smooth on the [Music] card to put things in more of a perspective halflife 2 the brand with ultra settings in 900p with well over 100 FPS in some of the more intensive open area segments and I like to use those for testing because you know even in those smaller more enclosed parts we could see even higher frames than this this was the latest version with all the fancy Source engine updates and for some reason though AR card was a bit funny about the source engine here and something odd was going on with resolutions as the game would only show us up to a 900p maximum despite supporting far higher it's very strange because we know this card can handle at least 1080p possibly even more in this game but still I've always had slight issues with teror scale drivers so 900p it will have to be ultra settings well over 100 FPS not a problem at [Music] all Grand Theft Auto 4 is renowned for running best on this era of gpus given they are from when this game came out and this port is so horrifically optimized that I swear every time they update it the benchmarks just completely change but anyway you know the issue is you run the in-game Benchmark and if you believe those figures apparently we're getting 57 FPS but the problem is that doesn't take into account the frame times which were erratic no matter what driver you used or what system you put the card into with the game regularly skipping around the place and being horrific mess however once I enabled a 30fps cap externally this was without a doubt one of the smoothest experiences I've had of GTA 4 that wasn't running in backwards compatibility on the Xbox One X just look at those frame times they are dead smooth and the input latency it felt like it vanished as soon as we had had that cap in place definitely more of an issue with the card not the card the game rather than the card and given how smooth we now have it I'd consider this a good experience for GTA 4 so well done 2900 XT and uh pretty bad showing GTA 4 when people think of city-builders you generally think lightweight and easy to run but that is really not the case here in City skylines we had to turn the game down to its absolute lowest settings to achieve anything resembling a playable frame rate and even then the game did struggle with larger towns and cities but still for the most part the 2900 XT did manage what can be a rather intensive game just as long as you weren't planning on growing anything too big you know if you went bigger than the initial plot of land the 2900 XT fell apart in standard fashion here where once things get intense you go over a cliff Edge from Sudden playability to just an awful experience which is something that has echoed throughout a few of these benchmarks now Skyrim on the other hand ran brilliantly with the game averaging near 60 FPS in a lot of places and of around the mid-50s when anything was going on the game defaulted to 720p high definition with the high preset and looked amazing while being very solid to play I was very surprised to see that our frame rates in cities was as high as it was given that's an area that usually is much more intensive than the world one area the 2900 XT seems to have over it into Nvidia competition is when the drivers actually support the game and a card has a chance to use its Brute Force Power you can see how this card was so nearly not a blunder it just seems like when games can understand this card and when the card has drivers that like the game you end up with an experience where you aren't just matching the consoles of that generation you are absolutely destroying them here with higher settings and nearly twice the frame rates but it's a shame that that isn't the go to experience on this [Music] card fa anniversary wasn't too bad either originally defaulting to all low settings it wasn't long before I started cranking a few of those options up and we did Run the game without the horrific FXAA it comes implemented with as it looks more like someone smeared Vaseline over the game and restore some rather Pleasant looking areas of an otherwise dreary world I prefer the Lost Chapters but that's already a given still when you were going around questing fighting doing whatever you wanted to do the game held up far better than I thought it would and did really well with that 55 FPS average even when there were lots of fancy effects going on which shows that once again when this card understands a game you get a good [Music] experience Grand Theft Auto 5 Ram with its usual AMD issues something that was prevalent on the game's release and was only a fixed with driver updates that these cards never got the card ran worse than even a 256 MB 8,800 GT from Nvidia the lowest end version so that really puts into perspective the choice with these kind of cards in single player for some reason the card never forgets fully utilized outside small bursts leading to very erratic frame times and horrific latency something that really shouldn't be the case here there is no way the amd's flagship should be doing worse than nvidia's cut down offering but it's an AMD issue with drivers and these cards are more than capable of running I'm sure a lot of games like this but unfortunately AMD threw us under the bus here and we don't have the drivers to you know come back and fix them however I did do some further testing later down the line with online mode but that'll be coming up in its own section and I think you'll find it very interesting just how well the game ran Kerbal Space Program is not an easy game to Benchmark given that it will suffer slowdown on even the best of PCS so trying to find settings that resembled a mix of one making the game look like something you want to play and two won't actually need Nas themselves to render it did prove a little bit of a challenge but eventually we got there with the game being fairly smooth all the while you weren't blasting huge rockets off into the sky not like that's what this game's about at all but you know you'd see 15 to 20 FPS but that isn't too much of the card's fault given the game could just run like this I know it can run slightly better on the Nvidia equivalent from this era where I've tested them but you know I I don't want to make too many excuses for this card it ran it could do better but at the same time this is not an easy game to Benchmark so playable but could be [Music] better eventually I did get Far Cry 3 to run turns out I'd never logged into the new Ubisoft launcher and my account was still tied to up playay and these AMD drivers caused some sort of issue that made them suspend my account I have no clue anyway they're weird issues I'm not sure if it's uoft to blame or AMD on this one for weird drivers but anyway rather annoying the game ran rather well and often the game can suffer with inconsistent frame rates and from what I understand is not too great of an experience on the next gen consoles where they can drop all over the place however here on an old 2900 XT it does manage fairly well there were of course drops when in combat but nothing too awful and I did this a very playable experience with a decent set of settings [Music] not exactly the height of difficulty with this one though rimor ran fine in 720p with the usual default settings enabled given this game's Unity Origins the game is heavily CPU bound mostly to one or two CS at the best and especially in the late game where the majority of slowdown comes from the process of struggling but still the graphics card was more than happy to render the game even if it is a top- down two-dimensional Colony Builder but still as as long as you had a good enough processor there's no reason why you couldn't play a great game like this with a 2900 XT Apparently one of the last games supporting directx10 according to the PC games Wiki and a few other sources with black Skylands released just last year in 2023 now I have never tried this game before and initially I thought we off to a brilliant start with some lovely looking pixel art cut scenes but that was about it see I know this game is called black Skylands but unless they meant that title literally all you get to see here on this graphics card is a black Skyland with a pleasant looking HUD over the top of it and even then it couldn't manage much more than 30 FPS with constant frame drops interesting but I'm not surprised but can it run crisis well yes and it did a spectacular job not quite 8800 GTX levels of performance not one bit at all but seeing the game Run with high settings in 900p is always something to look at there was no point lowering the resolution as the game generally ran about the same if not worse so we decided that 9 900p was The Sweet Spot however even across multiple sets of drivers the game did have issues with the resolution change sometimes completely dropping out the display until you blindly alt tabed your way back in when you change resolution a recurring theme here even if the performance is pretty solid the actual user experience can be quite poor and these issues isues didn't persist on a normal GPU in this system so yes this seems to be a terror scale one thing I don't know if maybe it's just me maybe it doesn't like the system but it didn't like resolution changes specifically to 720p and around that sort of Mark higher than this it was fine lower than this it was fine but 720p in crisis did weird [Music] things but I did mention GTA on line there and the easiest way for me to explain this and start the talk on drivers was to just tell you on the fly as I was benchmarking it and let you see for yourself exactly what I mean right so you join me back over in GTA but this time GTA online and as we saw from the benchmarks before GTA doesn't run particularly well on these older teror scale cards but GTA online seems to suffer less with the frame time issues um not majorly because these AMD drivers are notoriously rough but the game doesn't hitch as much in GTA Online and I've always said GTA online does tend to be a little bit less intensive regardless of what people think it's only when you get over 16 players and the net code breaks that the game runs much worse but as you can see we're actually seeing proper graphics card utilization here with frame times that are much smoother and much more playable than the single player experience and I don't know what it is but GTA online seems to utilize these terascale cards just a lot better than the um single player mode does because previously I was trying to control a plane in single player and I'm tapping a key and it's just doing nothing but here in GTA Online whoops uh here in GTA Online you know we're seeing relatively decent frame times as far as a terascale car goes and a relatively decent experience that we just didn't get before and I'm not too sure what it is in single player that causes that I mean there you go an explosion in single player you down to single digit frame rates but here in GTA Online I mean it's not ideal and the frame rate does take a little while to stabilize after it but it does run better it is more controllable there isn't that weird input latency and a guaranteed Spike I mean if we get in a car here maybe that can demonstrate it better but I think my main takeaway here is drivers are just such a limit on a card like this and I'm I'm never happy about it I've never been happy with teror scale drivers but it's just weird things like this that you can play GTA online absolutely fine we're playing here 720p with uh High textures and medium settings and you know the game looks all right it's running all right there's no insane latency I just can't wrap my head around why this is a thing now I know a lot of people like it when we test some emulation and generally you're looking at PS2 and GameCube emulation here that's the very most you'll be doing don't worry all your hand helds will run just fine when you want to move up to more modern consoles well you're going to be looking at custom Forks that either enabled direct X9 or open gl4 generally open gl4 worked better here which is weird for an AMD card but once you got them all sorted don't worry because we saw some great games running here with upscaling and full speed emulation Wind Waker here looked extremely good in a 720p resolution and didn't cause the card a moment of trouble and it saw full utilization [Music] throughout I did try and Dabble in a slight bit of overclocking which led to me setting a baseline test of 6553 in cloudgate and a rather respectable score which saw the demo run at a really fluent frame rate trust me when I say that I've seen these run in single digits the only issue is that any changes to our core or memory did not go down too well on the card with it either artifacting or crashing outright when any of these were changed you know to any amount that would make a degree of difference I know that a lot of these cards were sold with a 28 pin connector setup specifically for overclocking but we don't have that here I did try testing on a different set of drivers and even a completely different system but you know we've just lost the Silicon Lottery here shame as these things be pushed quite far with most people being able to max out the sliders but for us it's either artifacting or crashing which is a bit of a shame talking about changing drivers though I have to say that I've never been fond of amd's teror scale drivers mostly terascale 1 being more or less abandoned by AMD at the first possible instance with a final rushed out Beta release being the last thing these cards saw meanwhile Nvidia supported Tesla and the subsequent fery series these cards direct competition for years with great final drivers that were stable and even supported directx12 but these cards no no not one bit installing them to a modern operating system almost always requires you to manually do it via the INF file the automatically installing ones from Windows 7 and upwards are more or less useless regardless of the operating system you use it's now raining while I'm having this round and something's just fallen over but yeah there's a huge bug there once they install the drivers automatically with the operating system they show up as a generic display adapter but they show up as a 2900 XT in the actual display manager ridiculous either way I went back and tested three major releases of the latest beta drivers the final stable release and the Catalyst 10 drivers from the cards Heyday and there was little to no difference made in Black Mesa we saw the older drivers were slightly smoother but it was margin of error really because when you're actually running the game on a wish and a prayer well you know it's it's it's not great either way I will say catalyst 10 did run something slightly better when you know you have the full screen option on but even then that was because it didn't crash that's the only way that I mean that crisis ran slightly better on the older d drivers but between all three of them there was no discernable difference when you're actually playing it GTA 5 was absolutely unplayable on the final stable release of drivers either offline or online with the frame rate being all over the place and the early drivers ran in tandem with the beta drivers the Beta release having a slight Edge but once again very little difference between them and then finally halflife 2 showed that for the real Classics there is a genuine reason to hang about using the older drivers but still it it it all depends you know unless you're going to be running a game at 100 FPS with ultra settings do you want to go to the hassle of finding the older drivers probably not so yeah the rain has just stopped as I finished my rant that was oddly poetic that really built up the atmosphere but terascale drivers they're not good I really don't like them so I just can't wrap my head around why AMD left these drivers in such an awful way I know they weren't happy with the 2000 series but remember they had two generations more after this based on this terascale architecture and they were much more well-received so why is it a card that clearly from what we've seen today can handle its own nearly 20 years later was left in such a poor way I know AMD are probably ashamed of this card and it doesn't help the fact that they've left them this way these cards have virtually no modded driver support and you're stuck playing the lottery on Catalyst driver versions till you find one that works what you want it for and I find that appalling I haven't ever really been a big fan of of Terror scale but going back to use this card made me realize its potential until the onslaught of issues all revolving around the software made me accept that these cards were abandoned by their creator AMD with final drivers that were awful and you know we used a radian 9700 Pro last week on ATI drivers and the drivers were fine I used the same drivers for Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows Vista and Windows 7 and they were all right but why is it AMD have managed to do this thing so bad that the 2900 XT is unusable with even its final drivers so anyway hope you enjoyed that little rant um usually I'm a big defender of amds drivers since gcn I've had good experiences and before you know with the X X Series and prior they're good but Tera scale not enough people focus on that is where amd's issues start these drivers are awful and these cards are abandoned so there we have it the radian 2900 XT and what are my thoughts well I see exactly why AMD distant from it so fast with how it became stuck in this weird Middle Ground of an okay price to Performance Flagship but so many of these cards problems stem from AMD thems and the lack of support in the long run no way should this card struggle with games that a lower end 8800 GT from Nvidia with hardly any vram can manage but for those classic titles in 2024 well people are now scalping the 8000 series from Nvidia but these things are still flying under the radar so was once a flop has turned into kind of a retro King but just remember they have that reputation for a reason and AMD does not deserve to get away with offering final drivers this bad I mean they have got away with it because no one else is going out there to buy these cards but imagine how good this thing would have been in the long run imagine that fine wine technology applying to Terrace scale they could have carried these things on for years instead Tesla and fery tend to be doing better anyway I hope you all enjoyed this video and thank you very much for watching good night

Channel: Budget-Builds Official

Views: 60,929

Keywords: Radeon, AMD, Budget, 2900XT, Story, History, BEnchmarks, GTA, Budget Builds, Graphics Card, Budget Graphics Card, AMD or Nvidia, AMD vs Nvidia, Gaming, Showcase, Test, Budget Builds Official, Nvidia, 8800GTX, Radeon 2900XT, AMD First Graphics Card, DirectX10, Drivers

Id: SGMS1cMVGS4

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 07 2024