Radeon HD 2600 XT
The older model based on the RV630, the Radeon HD 2600 XT, was unable to provide an overwhelming advantage over its direct rival, the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT.
Despite specs close to those of Nvidia's more powerful card, the GeForce 8600 GTS. The main reason for this was the presence of only four blocks of raster operations in the RV630 core, as well as insufficiently debugged drivers.
On the other hand, the ATI Radeon HD 2600 proved to be an unsurpassed master of video playback. With a dedicated UVD decoder that supports all stages of decoding HD formats such as H.264 and VC-1, including entropy coding (CABAC and CAVLC) in hardware, as well as high image quality, RV630-based video adapters deservedly received the title of "best graphics card for multimedia system". Thus, the high popularity of ATI Radeon HD 2600 was predetermined.
But, in addition to the ability to decode video of various formats, graphics cards for multimedia systems must meet a number of other requirements: for example, to be economical, compact and silent. If the efficiency of the Radeon HD 2600 XT was the best, then with the compactness everything turned out far from so rosy - the reference design of the printed circuit board turned out to be rather cumbersome.
Specifications ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT
| Name | Radeon HD 2600XT |
| Core | RV630 |
| Process technology (µm) | 0.065 |
| Transistors (million) | 390 |
| Core frequency | 800 |
| Memory frequency (DDR) | 700 (1400) |
| Bus and memory type | GDDR3 128 Bit |
| Bandwidth (Gb/s) | 22.4 |
| Unified shader blocks | 120 |
| Frequency of unified shader units | 800 |
| TMU per conveyor | 8 (total) |
| ROP | 4 |
| textures per clock | 8 |
| textures per pass | 8 |
| Shader Model | 4.0 |
| Fill Rate (Mpix/s) | 3200 |
| Fill Rate (Mtex/s) | 6400 |
| DirectX | 10.0 |
| Anti-Aliasing (Max) | MS-24x |
| Anisotropic Filtering (Max) | 16x Quality |
| Memory | 256/512 |
| Interface | PCI-E/AGP |
| RAMDAC | 2x400 |