AMD today announced that XFX,<

XFX plans to provide new products based on the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs to consumers, beginning in early 2009. XFX has been Nvidia's partner until now.

"In the world of PC gaming, XFX is synonymous with the extreme performance that enthusiasts crave," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "Their decision to partner with AMD and launch AMD GPU-based XFX graphics cards, including the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, widely regarded as the world?s fastest graphics card by technology enthusiasts around the world, speaks to the level of excellence achieved by the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series."

"With the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 series, AMD redefined the graphics market and delivered graphics cards for gamers in every segment," said Michael Chiu, Chairman and CEO, Pine Technologies Holdings, makers of XFX graphics cards. "It wasn?t just AMD gaming prowess that caught our attention; the company?s technology leadership in multimedia performance, including video transcoding, HD content playback and surround sound audio, made it clear that AMD was and continues to be a great fit for users everywhere. We are excited by this partnership as it allows us to incorporate current and future ATI graphics technology into our graphics card designs, enabling our R&D teams to develop an even wider range of XFX graphics products for consumers in every region and every segment."

ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards were first introduced in June 2008 with the arrival of ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870. The two products represented the first graphics cards to deliver one TeraFLOPS or more of compute power. The ATI Radeon HD 4870, and its dual-GPU variant, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, continue to be the only graphics cards to utilize a frame buffer based on GDDR5 memory. Most recently, AMD launched the ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, offering performance at a price tag of less than USD $150.