AMD ATI Radeon HD 4800

Having had nVidia's latest graphics card launch within the last week or so, it was almost inevitable that AMD would want to show its hand. Enter the AMD ATI Radeon HD 4800-series,


Apparently (but unofficially for now) the 4870 will offer a faster 750MHz core clock and use GDDR5 memory which should be impressive. About a month later on an 'X2' version will apparently also be coming which will, oddly enough, be the flagship card of the range. The main advantage AMD has is that using a 55nm manufacturing process allows the production costs of the 4800-series to be considerably lower than that of the - which in turn means the cards are vastly cheaper. We're told to expect the 4850 to retail in the £130-150 region, half the price of the GeForce GTX 260 with which it will likely compete.


tegic decision to focus on GPU designs that maximized our efficiency and allowed us to provide enthusiasts, performance and mainstream users with the most compelling value proposition at every price point. The ATI Radeon 4800 series sets a new industry standard in key metrics such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar."

The ATI Radeon HD 4870, available immediately with a suggested retail price of USD$299, represents an unprecedented 1.2 teraFLOPS of visual compute power. It features a stock GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, 512 MB of GDDR5 memory rated at 3.6 gigabits/second, and comes in a dual-slot PCI Express 2.0 configuration with a maximum board power of 160 watts.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850, immediately available with a suggested retail price of USD$199, received an enthusiastic welcome from global graphics reviewers. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 is the world’s first teraFLOPS graphics chip, with 800 stream processing cores (identical to the ATI Radeon HD 4870), a stock GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, 512 MB of GDDR3 memory rated at 2 gigabits/second, and comes in a single-slot PCI Express 2.0 configuration with a maximum board power of 110 watts.