Looking over the benchmarks, there are only a handful of cases where the additional memory found in the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB allows it to truly outperform the 512MB Radeon HD 2900 XT card. Those cases are limited to Oblivion with HDR+AA, Far Cry with HDR+AA (4xAA in both cases) and surprisingly enough, Half-Life 2 Lost Coast.
And what about the competition from NVIDIA? As a result of a
recent blog post from Falcon Northwest CEO Kelt Reeves, there was some hope among ATI enthusiasts that the 1GB Radeon HD 2900 XT would put up an impressive showing against the GeForce 8800 GTX, but since the 1GB card performs so similarly to the Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB, the performance leaderboard really hasn’t changed in our opinion: NVIDIA is still definitely on top overall. There are cases where CrossFire shines against SLI under Vista (Quake 4 being one prominent example), but this is more due to the inadequate state of NVIDIA’s Vista SLI driver than anything else.
