ATI Radeon HD 4890 officially introduced

AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 4890 graphics card, claiming it's the most powerful graphics processor in the world with a computing power of 1.36 teraFLOPS. This new 55nm RV790 GPU has 956 million transistors, it features 800 stream processors and a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface. The core is clocked at 850MHz and the GDDR5 memory at 975MHz (3900MHz effective).

Basically it's an overclocked version of the Radeon HD 4870 (RV770), with some architectural enhancements. It's now available in retail stores for $249, and can be found for $229 if you're a fan of mail-in-rebates.

AMD (NYSE: AMD - News) today introduced the ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 graphics card, driven by the world’s most powerful graphics processor1. The newest addition to the award-winning ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series boasts a whopping 1.36 TeraFLOPs of compute power, superior GDDR5 memory, and super-high engine clock speeds capable of nearly 1GHz. The advanced design of the ATI Radeon HD 4890 delivers the best game experience in its class, including the latest ground-breaking DirectX® 10.1 titles. In addition, with the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 4890, AMD continues to enhance its “Dragon” desktop platform technology, designed to provide exceptional value to OEMs, channel partners, and do-it-yourself (DIY) consumers.

“The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card represents the AMD sweet spot strategy reloaded,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “With last year’s launch of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 and ATI Radeon™ HD 4870 products, we gave gamers great performance and an incredible value proposition. Today, we’re doing it again. ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards are incredible performers, priced to sell in all major markets worldwide.”

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card continues AMD’s proud tradition of technology leadership with support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games, including Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.™, Electronic Art’s BattleForge™ and SEGA’s Stormrise™ released last month, as well as GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky. When compared to DirectX 10 game play, DirectX 10.1 games have proven to deliver higher game performance and an improved visual experience.

“The new ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card could very well be the must-have gaming product of this spring,” said Adrian Thomson, vice president, Marketing, Sapphire. “With breakthrough levels of game performance, cutting-edge feature support like DirectX 10.1, and high degree of performance tuning flexibility, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is one of the best performers in its class.”