We received some benchmarks from Radeon HD 2600PRO card going versus Geforce 8500GT on a 6000+. This is how ATI wants to position Radeon HD 2600PRO generation as it should cost around €80. We checked but it was not available at press time but this is the price.

So the pricewise Radeon HD 2600PRO should be compared to 8500 GT and Radeon clearly wins here as it scores 3427 in 3Dmark06 while Geforce 8500GT at default clock scores 2437. These numbers are the best case scenario but we expect to get the 2400 and 2600 cards in the Vienna lab to give them a real ride.

Our sources also indicated that HD 2600PRO card has UVD and accelerates a lot of Video including VC-1 while 8500GT doesn't fully covers the VC-1 codec currently used by most of the HD DVD titles and heavily used on Blu-ray drives as well.

The last point is that HD 2600 PRO has built in HDCP and HDMI via DVI dongle and some Nvidia partners can do this but it will cost them money. We still want to do some additional testing before we draw a final conclusion.

So this is The Way ATI Wants to Position Its Card.