AMD Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 will compete against GeForce 9800 series

Posted on Wednesday, May 28 2008 @ 19:01:20 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck

The Chinese edition of Tom's Hardware Guide got their hands on some marketing slides of AMD's upcoming graphics cards. One of the things these slides reveal is that the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards won't compete against NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce GTX 260 or 280 graphics cards. Performance wise the upcoming RV770 GPUs from AMD won't be that exciting as they are merely catching up with NVIDIA's current generation graphics cards but if the price is right they may have a good price/performance ratio.

The Radeon HD 4850 (RV770 PRO) is positioned as a GeForce 9800 GTX rival and the Radeon HD 4870 (RV770 XT) will be a bit faster, but slower than a GeForce 9800 GX2. The slide also reveals the dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 (R700) graphics card will be faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2 but word is going around the R700 won't be available until late July or possibly even later.

The Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 will cost around $229, it will have a 110W TDP and use a single-slot cooler. The Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR3 will be around 30% faster and will have a $329 price tag, the card will have a 160W TDP and will need a dual-slot cooler. Here's the table, but keep in mind that the prices quoted for the NVIDIA graphics cards are higher than the current retail prices.

There's also a table that learns us that the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 will be launched with 512MB GDDR5 (RV770 XT) or 512MB GDDR3 (RV770 PRO). Cards with 1GB memory will follow later.

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AMD Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 will compete against GeForce 9800 series