AMD Pulls the Cover on Radeon HD4800 Series

The next-generation Radeons should boast drastically improved performance, and efficiency to boot.

AMD broke into a new first digit on its ATI Radeon HD line of GPUs this week, signaling that the latest and greatest in AMD-powered graphics is once again coming down the pipe. The company hasn’t been shy about the new HD 4800 cards, building up big expectations by claiming that they double the processing power of the old line while doing it twice as efficiently.

The new TeraScale graphics engine would appear to be at the heart of the performance boost, giving the cards over one teraflops of processing power by way of over 800 stream processors (the fastest cards in the previous generation featured only 640.) Memory has also been bumped up from GDDR3 to GDDR5, a move that provides twice the bandwidth for the next-gen cards. Perfomance-per-watt has allegedly been doubled from the Radeon 3800 GPUs with platform-independent intelligent power management, which throttles the card down when idling.

The 4800-series cards will also come with a host of technologies for handling HD video, from the mundane playback of Blu-ray movies to faster HD editing capabilities. ATI’s Avivo HD technology, for instance, should allow raw HD video to be compressed into the compact H.264 and MPEG-2 formats at 1.8 times faster than real-time.

The two reference cards in the series, the HD4870 and HD4850, will retail for $299 and $199, respectively. The HD4850 retains most of the HD4870s advancements, including the 800 stream processors, but bumps down clock speed and switches to slower GDDR3 RAM.