Late or not, the present day is the present day, and NVIDIA's DirectX 10 graphics boards finally have some competition at the high-end, courtesy of ATI's latest R600 architecture as leveraged in the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Ignoring NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra parts, and instead focusing its aim upon the lower priced GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, the Radeon HD 2900 XT packs an almighty punch on paper between its massive memory bus and vast number of shader processors. Of course, we all know better than to simply assume that a theoretically impressive design will translate well into creating a real-world winner, and thus today is the day where we stop talking about the Radeon HD 2900 XT in theoretical terms here at Elite Bastards, and sit down to take a look at its actual performance characteristics. Sapphire have been kind enough to provide the sample to this end, and so it is their reference specification-based SKU that gets put through its paces in our benchmarking suite.