HotHardware reviews ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 video cards
When the R600 GPU hit the scene last May in the form of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, it wasn't very well received by enthusiasts for a few key reasons. For one, the Radeon HD 2900 XT generally consumed more power and generated more heat than NVIDIA's already well established GeForce 8800 GTS. In addition, the 2900 XT was also louder, more expensive, and also didn't quite perform as well as the 8800 GTS, not to mention it was missing UVD support. A home run product the Radeon HD 2900 XT was not.
From a technical standpoint, however, the R600 was promising. It had full DX10 support, top notch image quality, gobs of memory bandwidth, and a number of innovations like HDMI output with audio and new anti-aliasing modes. After testing the Radeon HD 2900 XT and watching it mature in the marketplace these past few months, we couldn't help but wonder how the R600 would have been received had AMD built the chips using a more advanced manufacturing process that could help mitigate some of its fundamental shortcomings...
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