AMD today officially announced the launch of the first teraFLOPS graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 4850, and the launch of the first graphics card featuring ultra high bandwidth GDDR5 memory, the ATI Radeon HD 4870.
Both the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 are immediately available for $200 and $299 respectively.
"The ATI Radeon 4800 series represents a 2X performance jump over the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU, the biggest generational increase since the game-changing launch of the Radeon 9700 in 2002," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "AMD made a strategic 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 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.
Building versions of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series are VisionTek, ASUS, PowerColor, MSI, GIGABYTE, GECUBE, Force3D, SAPPHIRE Technology, Diamond Multimedia, Club 3D, HIS (Hightech Information Systems) and Palit Multimedia.
The ATI Radeon HD 4800 series will allow users to experience HD digital content while it can also help improve the definition and image quality of any visual media including standard DVDs and videos. The new series also includes new HD media capabilities, like picture-in-picture HD viewing, fast format conversion of your favorite media, and support for the latest HD audio technologies like 7.1 surround sound.
ATI PowerPlay technology intelligently adjusts requirements to ensure performance is there when you need it most while throttling back for lesser user demands.
With the ATI Radeon HD 3870, AMD set a new performance per watt standard, which has been broken by the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. Compared to the ATI Radeon HD 3870 series GPU, the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series delivers twice the performance while drawing only 20 percent more power.
Below you can see a comparison between AMD's HD 3800 and the new HD 4800 series of graphics cards:
| |
ATI radeon HD 3800 |
ATI radeon HD 4800 |
Difference |
| Process |
55nm |
55nm |
no |
| Die size |
190 mm2 |
256 mm2 |
1.35x |
| Tranzistors |
666M |
956M |
1.4x |
| 4x AA Fillrate |
8 |
16 |
2x |
| Z/Stencil |
32 |
64 |
2x |
| Texture |
16 |
40 |
2.5x |
| Shader |
320 |
800 |
2.5x |
| Bandwidth |
72 GB/sec |
115.2 GB/sec |
1.6x |