Thus, while these benchmarks show some interesting performance figures, they are just the very tip of the iceberg and should hopefully improve. Working with an engineering sample is never easy and the HD2600 XT was no exception; it and its beta drivers do not make friendly bedfellows. Only in the last few beta driver revisions were the performance figures improved and even then they were still far below expectations. Hopefully, our engineering sample fell far from the tree and the actual retail cards will have a bit more performance in them.