The much-awaited R600 has, after months of delay, finally come. Sadly, it seems, it has also already gone. With the ho-hum launch over with, hardware sites all over the net began crawling all over the new card and benching them as much as they could. Starting off with the Radeon HD 2900 XT, the new champ appears to be getting mixed reviews. Some are playing up its advantages, of which it has many. Just the same, many are pointing out its flaws, such as greater power consumption than expected. Performance wise, it's not coming all that much farther ahead than the 8800 GTX, or much farther behind. That's disappointing, but not altogether that surprising. Certainly, for such a beefy card, it isn't a lackluster performance - the delay to market is what has really killed AMD here.

All hope is not lost, however. AMD plans to soon introduce a 65nm version of the various cards they will output, and perhaps the fallout from purchasing ATI will begin to settle. I certainly hope so, because we've come to expect more from them. If they hope to remain competitive with Nvidia they'll definitely need to make the next iteration a step up. Here are some reviews around the web: HardOCP, Tom's Hardware, Anandtech.