Tuesday, August 12, 2008

AMD Launches World’s Fastest Graphics Card ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2

AMD today announced the world’s fastest graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, advancing visual computing ever closer to eye-definition computing gaming and cinematic experiences and delivering a whopping 2.4 teraFLOPS of processing power. Also announced today is the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 graphics card, delivering blistering performance at a compelling price point.

These cards comprise the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series, combining two ATI Radeon HD 4800 series GPUs with a more advanced cross-GPU connection based on the PCIe 2.0 standard, plus two gigabytes of memory – the most in any currently available consumer graphics card. These technologies combine to make the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series perfectly suited for the most demanding games, able to deliver astonishing frame rates at extreme resolutions and image quality settings.

The secret behind this speed is a new generation 2 switch and a sideport interface that comes with the 4870X2. Although there are no current applications that will benefit from the sideport, AMD says that they will be developed in the future, meaning that there will be performance increase in certain stream computing applications. It should be the case to do so, as the card is able to offer up to 2.4 terraflops of compute power.

The capabilities of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series were on display yesterday in New York City, where leading experts from the game development community and Hollywood joined AMD to discuss and demonstrate eye-definition computing computing. Eye-definition computing is the art and science of achieving visual computing experiences that seem optically real. The tremendous computational 2.4 teraFLOPS horsepower of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series makes computing experiences that approach eye-definition computing possible. The first application of eye-definition computing computing, demonstrated by AMD in New York yesterday, is Cinema 2.0, the fusion of digital people, places and things, rendered with real-time interactivity. Cinema 2.0 shows the power to digitally create interactive environments and characters that seem optically real in either a video game or digital cinema context. With the help of leading content creators, AMD demonstrated the first “virtual” actor to be rendered in real-time in perfect, lifelike detail, via the incredible processing power found in the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series.

Based on an advanced 55nm design and leading DirectX 10.1 support, the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series delivers engineering elegance and the industry’s most compelling feature set. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 is immediately available from e-tailers worldwide priced at USD $549 SRP, while the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 is scheduled to be available in September at an estimated price of USD $399.

The world’s fastest graphics card

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 delivers unsurpassed graphics horsepower, setting a new performance bar for visual computing with 2.4 teraFLOPS of processing power on a single card. It is also the world’s first graphics card to include 2GB of ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory. The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 features two GPUs based on a second generation 55nm technology and clocked at 750 MHz, with a combined 1600 stream processors.

Engineered to be the world’s fastest graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 was built with efficiency, scalability and performance in mind, delivering four times the performance efficiency AMD high-end GPU offerings released just one year ago.

New levels of performance under $400

Setting a new performance standard in graphics cards priced under $400, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 provides the power to play today’s most demanding titles at ultra-high settings. Like its big brother, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 features 1600 stream processors, and two GPUs clocked at 625 MHz. The ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 features 2GB of GDDR3 memory.

Ecosystem Support

The ATI Radeon HD 4800 series is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies offering custom designs of the products. Building high-performance versions of the ATI Radeon HD 4800 X2 series products are, ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, GIGABYTE, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology and VisionTek.

No comments: