AMD is to blame for 2900XT/UVD fiasco

IT SEEMS THAT the launch of Radeon HD 2000 series just cannot bring good news for AMD.

First of all, the driver that will enable us to do stable testing of single and dual HD2900XT cards is due out next week - we have tried to test apps under Vista and we were just gutted by the amount of "display driver has stopped responding" messages.

But sadly, the topic of this story is not the performance of Radeon HD 2900XT, rather its features.

Several well-known websites, as we reported, said that the HD2900XT features a Universal Video Decoder. What got things into seventh gear is the fact that several owners of HIS Radeon HD 2900XT smelt their opportunity for some serious dough - because a retail box from AMD's largest partners such as HIS and Sapphire state that Radeon HD 2900XT has UVD. For video-savvy users, UVD was hyped by AMD to heavens' high, so it is understandable that a circus was unavoidable.

A quick search on the Google for 2900XT UVD resulted in ton of links to on-line stores selling HIS boards, this was one of many

OCUK sells UVD R600s as well, same goes for Amazon, Newegg and many others...

It seems that HIS released "UVD" on the retail box, but was not the only one, since Sapphire's promo text included UVD as well. We tried to check what was going on and what could exactly be the source of confusion. The answer is somewhat unlikely: AMD's own official slides. We got a hold of some presentations that were the source of confusion, and we will leave you to make the final judgement on this one. Just to let you know, 2900XT is not the only member of HD 2000 series that does not come with UVD. That Mobility Radeon HD 2300 is also a culprit, since it is a DirectX 9 part (rebadged X16x0).

Slide extragavanza
These five slides were showed during two days of marchitectural presentations in the Hotel Sheraton in Tunisia. Just see the slides and you can use your logic to see who is right: AMD or partners... or nobody?

A Perfect 10 ended up with launch of two - and neither of the two comes with UVD, branded as Avivo HD

Yes, ATi Radeon is first with UVD and 512-bit interface... first for Vista? Sadly, this one is not so true

As you can see, Avivo HD is UVD, nothing else... and since HD2900XT comes with Avivo HD, what happened here?

Answer to this question is actually quite simple: R600 chip has AVP or Advanced Video Processing... a feature that does not work with first series of drivers for HD2900XT. As we all know, 8.38 drivers got delayed by three weeks and launch was held with build 8.37v4, originally produced in April.

YES! All Radeon HD 2000 products come on market with Avivo HD, or should we say UVD (see previous slide for explanation)?

Situation was cleared by AMD's reps only in this slide, clearly citing that UVD is a feature of paper-launched 2400 and 2600

So, after seeing suspicious slides, what can we conclude? While it is certain that several partners and media got their assumptions wrong, there is no other than DAAMIT to blame for the confusion. This confusion is going on in the channel, among partners and press for over half a year now. All of the delays and confusion can be blamed to pathetic power-games between AMD and ATI people (as we already stated, this takeover can be compared with AOL Time Warner - with AMD playing the role of AOL). The fact that AMD bought a company that was a market leader in many segments, and shipped more chips per annum than AMD itself - was something that executive level failed to address properly.

All of the statements made by partners were confirmed by AMD, thus Sapphire or HIS did not work on their own, by blindingly following the documents and quotes they had in hand - this messy situation was caused. It could have been easily avoided, but even yours truly would leave Tunis with impression that R600 has UVD, given the fact that Xilleon chip is integrated inside the chip. Sadly, this was not case with UVD.

In the end, we were very sorry to see senior AMD exec peed off at us, and at the same time failed to proofread the presentations they were giving out not just to the press, but to their own partners as well. BTW guys, resolutions such as 1024x720, 1680x1080 or 2560x1200 actually do not exist, or at least do not satisfy 16:9 and 16:10 standards. µ

L'INQ
Amazon sells UVD empowered 2900XT
One of numerous stores selling HIS UVD empowered 2900XT
Even OcUK sells UVD empowered 2900XT
Sapphre joined the party with their UVD empowered 2900XT
Sapphire product page features 2900XT and UVD - taken from official AMD guidelines
HIS can also be blamed for listening to AMD's problematic docs
PowerColor went into far greater detail, so these guys did not specificaly mentioned UVD on their web-site