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ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series represents a new milestone in graphics architecture, with 800 cores driving cinema-quality realism in all aspects of visual computing . AMD (NYSE:AMD) today achieved two world firsts in visual computing: 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.
These two innovations combine with trademark AMD energy-efficient design and powerful DirectX® 10.1 compatibility to deliver superior performance at the high-volume mainstream and performance price points. Both the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 are immediately available. “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.
” AMD customers expressed excitement with the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series. “The new ATI Radeon HD 4800 series cards have really impressed us in a lot of areas,” said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest. “In performance, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 just blew past competing cards at their respective price levels. Each draws less power and produces less fan noise for this level of performance as well. To cap it off, the driver support is solid. The ATI Radeon HD 4800 series represents a huge leap forward for AMD.”
“It is remarkable that we are now able to build high performance gaming PCs with over one teraFLOPS of compute power inside,” said Patrick Cooper, director of Product Planning, Alienware. “With that kind of performance and the addition of visual enhancements made possible by DirectX 10.1 and tessellation, gamers can now achieve cinema-quality realism. It’s an incredible step forward in gaming and Alienware is looking forward to introducing the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series in the near future.
” ATI Radeon HD 4870 introduces GDDR5 performance, pushes 1.2 teraFLOPS 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. ATI Radeon HD 4850: one teraFLOPS of visual compute power 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. Industry excitement for the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series is evidenced in one dozen AIB (Add-In-Board) companies offering custom designs of the products, a record number for AMD.
Building high-performance 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. Systems integrators launching ATI Radeon HD 4800 series include ABS, Alienware, AMAX, Canada Computers, CyberPower, Extreme PC Corporation, Falcon-Northwest, iBUYPOWER, Maingear, Systemax, Ultra Gaming and Velocity Micro.
AMD’s Radeon 4800 series launches a bit later than originally expected, but AMD promises a huge jump in performance, especially in number crunching horsepower: The Radeon 4870 delivers 1.2 TFlops, which would be at least 20% above the rating of Nvidia ’s GT200 series.
This time, AMD needs a winner. The company has been trailing its green rival for quite some time, gave up market share, customers, credibility and – most of all – lots of cash. If early reviews are any indication, the new Radeon 4800 should put the former ATI back on the map with products that may not quite reach the gaming performance of Nvidia in all benchmarks, but offer a convincing speed at mainstream price points. ATI Radeon HD 4850 cards are selling for about $200 and 4870 versions for $300. AMD itself claims that “the ATI Radeon 4800 series represents a 2X performance jump over the HD 3800 GPU,” which would be “the biggest generational increase since the game-changing launch of the Radeon 9700 in 2002.
” $200 will buy 800 stream processors, a “stock” GPU core clock speed of 625 MHz, 512 MB of GDDR3 memory rated at 2 Gb/s, and comes in a single-slot PCI Express 2.0 configuration with a maximum board power of 110 watts. Expect overclocked boards with about 675 MHz to be introduced by varies vendors in the near future. The upgrade to a 4870 version will deliver a stock GPU core clock speed of 750 MHz, 512 MB of GDDR5 memory rated at 3.6 Gb/s, and comes in a dual-slot PCI Express 2.0 configuration with a maximum board power of 160 watts. AMD claims that, compared to the 3800 series, twice the speed is achieved with an increase of 20% in power. Especially impressive is, if correct, AMD’s claim of a maximum performance of 1.2 TFlops. Four GPUs and 3200 stream processors in CrossfireX configuration could yield close to 5 TFlops, taking an enthusiast PC into supercomputer territory. It will be interesting to watch the impact of such systems in applications such as Folding@Home as well as desktop GPGPU applications that can take advantage of this hidden potential in graphics cards.
Both the 4850 and 4870 are available now, AMD said. According to the company one dozen add-in-board companies will be offering custom designs of the products. “High-performance” versions of the 4800 series will be offered by are VisionTek, Asus, PowerColor, MSI, Gigabyte, GeCube, Force3D, Sapphire, Diamond, Club 3D, HIS and Palit.
Systems integrators launching ATI Radeon HD 4800 series include ABS, Alienware, AMAX, Canada Computers, CyberPower, Extreme PC, Falcon-Northwest, iBuyPower, Maingear, Systemax, Ultra Gaming and Velocity Micro.
Early last month Nvidia released the GeForce 9800 GTX which today stands as the fastest single GPU graphics card money can buy. With an average retail price of $300-350, the GeForce 9800 GTX may not have been revolutionary in terms of performance, but it's still a reasonably good value solution for those willing to spend a bit more. However, after almost sixty days of its release and with an eventual appearance of next-generation cards from both ATI and Nvidia, few manufacturers seem to be making pronounced efforts on modifying or improving the original Nvidia reference design. What we are seeing the most are modest factory overclocking, but no manufacturers that we know of have upgraded the cooler anyway.
That is until we received the iChiLL 9800 GTX Accelero Xtreme from Inno3D, which features a mammoth heatsink that is cooled by no less than three fans. Admittedly the reference Nvidia cooler worked very well already, as we saw how our early sample from Asus never got past the 67 degrees when stressed. This made the GeForce 9800 GTX comparatively cooler than other performance graphics card we had tested. Nevertheless, Inno3D has seen a means to improve on this and have evidently done so. Those of you more educated in the arts of PC cooling have probably recognized by the name of this product that Inno has employed the new Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 9800 cooler.
This cooler alone retails for ~$55 which is only good news for prospective buyers of this graphics card since it's retailing on par with other standard-equipped products at just $315. Based on our previous experiences with the original Accelero Xtreme 8800 cooler we know this newer version is going to be an excellent addition to this powerful graphics solution. As logic would suggest, Inno3D has justified the extra cooling with a little overclocking of their own. For now let's move on to see the card in more detail.
While admittedly I spend much of my time testing high-end motherboards that come at astronomical prices, and graphics cards that cost more than some people's first cars, I never forget about the importance of value. In fact, the one thing that I constantly keep in the back of my mind when evaluating any product is how well it stacks up in terms of value and its competitors.
Talking specifically about graphics cards, let's take the super fast GeForce 9800 GX@ as an example. While this is an impressive product in terms of performance, it is not a great value solution. On the other hand, the mid-range GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD 3870 graphics cards are exceptionally good value products. Then we have the budget-minded cards which mainly consist of previous generation ATI and Nvidia products, with the recent addition of the Radeon HD 3650. The Radeon HD 3650 looks to be an attractive product on paper, it is the latest member of the Radeon HD 3000 series, and can carry up to 1GB of memory on-board. The 3650 is also a Direct X 10.1 compliant card that supports the PCI Express 2.0 bus.
Furthermore, like all Radeon HD 3000 series products, this new low-end graphics card is built using a 55nm design process. Topped off with a 725MHz core speed, the Radeon HD 3650 sounds like quite a gutsy little graphics card. But of course the card had to fell short in other places, otherwise we wouldn't be calling it a budget product. For example, it is limited to a 128-bit wide memory bus, and when combined with rather sluggish GDDR2 memory, the Radeon HD 3650 produces a memory bandwidth of just 16GB/s. To put this figure into perspective, it is comparable to the Radeon X700 XT which was released back in 2004. This goes to remind us what is the Radeon HD 3650 is targeted to a certain less demanding crowd and that we shouldn't expect spectacular results on the gaming front.
Other interesting features of the Radeon HD 3650, many of which are inherited from its bigger brothers, include CrossFireX multi-GPU support, an unified video decoder, and integrated digital outputs. While CrossFireX is aimed at gaming, the video decoder and digital outputs are more focused on home theater use.
The Radeon HD 3650 currently costs roughly $75 for the 512MB version and $95 for the 1GB version, making this a sub-$100 graphics card on all of its available versions.
This is the day that all PC gamers dread. The graphics card they just sank a couple hundred dollars into is no longer the graphical king of the hill. The new heir to the throne: Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2. And it'll only cost you between $600 and $650. So what makes this card such a big deal? The 9800 is a powerhouse. In fact, it physically feels like two 8800 GTX's sandwiched into a single card and the specs justify that notion -- it has two 128 Processor Cores (256 advertised on the box), two times the 512MB GDDR3 memory (512MB per GPU). With a 600-MHz core clock, 1500-MHz shader clock and 1000-MHz memory clock, it promises to crush benchmark scores.
I say "promises" and not "definitely" because final retail cards are only now trickling into the office (first out the gate: cards from Asus and EVGA) and we weren't able to get testing done in time for this morning's announcement. Stay tuned for some definitive answers on who can build the better graphics-chugging hotrod.
Why Should You Care? The 9800 GX2 will no doubt eat benchmarks for breakfast and do all sorts of nifty things like support DirectX 10, and the company uses buzzwords to talk about the GPU's 16X antialiasing performance, 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range lighting, and ability to run physics computations.
Beyond generating top-flight graphics, the 9800 GX2 also delivers 2560-by-1600-pixel video with support for High-Definition Content Protection (HDCP) over both the card's DVI and HDMI outputs. The card bears the brunt of video decoding for H.264, VC-1, WMV, and MPEG-2 high-definition (and standard-definition) movies; plus, it will handle the all-important 3:2 and 2:2 pull-down corrections for videophiles that crave accurate video reproduction. (Also referred to as motion judder, the pull-down is a ratio correction for frame rates when you transfer film to video. It introduces a slight image lag.)
As an environmentally conscious gamer, I'm actually happy to see this PCI Express 2.0-ready board show off Nvidia's HybridPower technology. This cuts down on wasted wattage: When you're performing tasks that don't require the card's full-blown horsepower, it'll throttle down the GPU and switch over to the integrated graphics card on Nvidia-branded motherboards.
Nvidia jumped into the market for mobile Internet devices (MIDs) on Monday with the introduction of a processor family based on the Arm processor core Tegra will primarily compete against Intel, which released a chip platform called Centrino Atom in April. Atom is designed for MIDs, a general name for portable computers that can be used for Web access and other activities while being small enough for users to carry them around in a pocket. The Tegra line comprises three chips, including the 800MHz Tegra 650 and 700MHz Tegra 600. The lineup will also include the APX 2500, an Nvidia processor designed for cell phones and smartphones that was announced earlier this year. The heart of the Tegra chips is an Arm11 processor core from Arm. The chips also include a GeForce graphics core, high-definition video decoder and other components, allowing them to perform functions normally carried out by several different chips. Putting all of these capabilities in a single chip allows system makers to produce smaller devices and reduces the amount of power these devices consume, allowing longer battery life. To illustrate how Tegra can save space, Nvidia showed an Eee PC from Asustek Computer with the motherboard removed and replaced with a Tegra-based board that measured 43 millimeters square. The only other component required for the computer to function was a battery.
The Arm processor core uses a different instruction set than x86 processors made by Intel. This means that software written for a PC or laptop cannot run an Arm-based computer. But Arm processors have long been used in mobile devices and generally consume far less power than x86 processors, making them ideal for small, portable devices. Indeed, two of the most successful devices that fit Intel's description of a MID are based on Arm processors: Apple's iPod Touch and Nokia's N800.
Highlights : -->Dual Dual-Link TMDS Connector allows resolutions of up to 2048x1536 pixels
-->Features a 1620 MHz Shader Clock -->Incorporates nView Multi-Display Technology
-->Provides 16x full-screen anti-aliasing
-->Offers 128-bit floating point high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting.
Overview : Explore a stunning combination of power and performance with the e-GeForce™ 8800 GT Superclocked™ PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card from EVGA®. Powered by NVIDIA® nView® multi-display technology, this card offers flexibility for multi-display options, and provides a high level of end-user control of the desktop. The featured NVIDIA PureVideo™ technology helps ensure high picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color and precise image scaling for almost all video content to turn your PC into a high-end home theater. Additionally, this card boasts of a 512 MB 256-bit GDDR3 memory to deliver a dazzling visual experience optimized to support compelling next-generation 3D gaming environments. The 8800 GT also features the NVIDIA SLI™ Technology that helps scale performance by allowing two graphics cards to be run in parallel. In addition DVI-I and HDTV connectors offer high speed connectivity and let you experience sharp, vivid images and text without sacrificing frame rates. This card supports Microsoft® DirectX® 10 Shader Model 4.0 and OpenGL® 2.0 optimizations, allowing for high-quality graphics and 3D textures that add a natural and realistic look to your games. With a host of other features like NVIDIA unified architecture with GigaThread™ technology and NVIDIA Quantum Effects™ physics processing technology, the 8800 GT indulges you in a breath-taking visual treat.
