#ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT 256MB MAC MOVIE#
#ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT 256MB MAC DRIVER#
#ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT 256MB MAC PRO#

The API is experiencing teething troubles of a lycanthropic order, and it's going to take a lot more time and even more money to sort that out.Р вЂќР вЂћll of which leads us to the inescapable conclusion that, if you're shopping for a gamer's graphics card in the midrange, you're better off with one of the truly refined DX9 cards available - such as the X1950 Pro or XT. Until we see games that have been built with DX10 in mind from the very start, that's unlikely to change.

The pitiful performance you'll see in these titles makes every DX10 card out there seem a colossal waste of money - and if high-end cards can't cut it, what's the hope for midrange and budget offerings? Right now, we have no 'proper' DX10 games - only bolt-on patches for existing titles, which is no kind of solution at all. The X1950 has fewer bells and whistles, granted - no native HD decoding, no unified shader paths, no tessellation engine or geometry cleverness - but its raw grunt in DX9 games makes it a better gamer's card, pure and simple. So at its price point, how does it compare with competing cards? Well, It's outperformed by the 8600GT in most games, and frankly torn to shreds by ATI's previous midrange hero, the still-awesome X1950 Pro, which is available for a mere tenner more. Although it does ship with a nice DVI-to-HDMI converter in the bundle. Actually, it's suddenly looking like considerably less of a selling point. And you've managed to get all your HDCP components to talk to each other properly. That's assuming you've forked out the king's ransom required to net a Blu-ray player.

#ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT 256MB MAC MOVIE#

Unlike NVIDIA's 8-series cards, it can decode VC1 completely on the GPU, which means your processor is under virtually no load while watching Blu-ray movies or hi-def movie files. The card's saving grace is its HD video decompression. Given the rotten performance of high-end cards under the early crop of DX10 apps, we couldn't bring ourselves to try the HD2600XT out in this environment, so all the benchmarks you see over yonder were recorded under DX9, in XP. Which means the only currently available unified-shader midrange card worth a fig is the 8800GTS 320MB.

In fact, we'd go as far as to say this is a budget card, not a midranger at all - it is less than Р вЂ™Р в‚¬100, after all.

#ATI RADEON HD 2600 XT 256MB MAC DRIVER#

An early driver issue, but the fact remains. It can't even run Half Life 2 - a three year-old game, now - at better than 41FPS at 1680 x 1050, and it refused to fire up 3DMark 2006 on our test rig. See the benchmarks over yonder, and weep. And did we mention that card's middling games performance?Р вЂќР вЂћTI's new midrange offering can't match NVIDIA's effort in the framerate stakes. The HD2900XT has been launched at a near-identical price-point to the 8600GT. On the other, it's a worry - 65nm production process aside, exactly how much clout can an unpowered card really muster?Р вЂќР вЂћnd the answer, unsurprisingly, is not much. On the one hand, this is a good thing less power consumption means a more efficient PC. Somewhat curiously, the card doesn't require any powering beyond that from the PCI-E bus no six-pin plug socket, not even a winky-wee Molex. Another key comparison point is the number of ROPs - 4x2, rather than the HD2900XT's 16x2. Sadly, the memory bus is a weedy 128-bit - the same as the 8600GT - and given that the less-than-stellar HD2900XT featured a 512-bit bus, one immediately feels the eyebrows dropping.

Ati radeon hd 2600 xt 256mb mac