Digital Trends
High-end gamers have been ratcheting up the cycles on their graphics cards for years, hoping to eake out more frame rates in games so they can dominate LAN parties and (of course) win their contents fair and square. Now, chipmaker AMD is getting in on the act, offering the world’s first 1 GHz graphics card in the form of a jacked-up ATI Radeon HD 4890. Unlike home-cranked graphics cards, the Radeon HD 4890 actually comes with a warranty—and, somewhat surprisingly, the unit is still air-cooled.
Hot on the heels of its latest Radeon HD 4550 and 4350 budget graphics cards, ATI debuted its mid-ranged Radeon HD4830 on Thursday. Unlike the earlier entries that hit the rock-bottom $39 price point, the new card will slide in just under the $150 level, but offer many of the same capabilities as its high-end cards.
Like the more expensive Radeon 4850 and 4870 models that share the same architecture, the 4830 uses a 55nm chip with 956 million transistors packed on board, but scales the number of stream processors down from 800 to 640. However, it still pulls off many of the same tricks, including UVD 2.0 HD video decoding, anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and supports ATI’s CrossFireX for adding up to four cards to a single system.
Sure, AMD subsidiary ATI might be known for cranking out some high-end graphics solutions that fuel gamers’ dreams, but lately they’ve also been focussing on mainstream graphics solutions that can give a boost to an “ordinary” PC and make it more viable for modern gaming titles and HD entertainment. To that end, the company has announced its new ATI Radeon HD 4550 and HD 4350 graphics cards…at easily affordable prices.
Having just expanded the budget end of its Radeon line on Thursday, AMD turned its attention back to the bleeding edge on Monday with the release of its new flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 3870 X2. The company claims it is the first graphics processor to break the teraflop processing level of one trillion floating point calculations a second, thanks to a dual-processor design.
AMD gave budget-minded gamers something new to swoon over on Wednesday with the introduction of its ATI Radeon HD 3800 series graphics processors. Unlike high-end GPUs with prices that soar up $500, the latest cards in AMD’s Radeon line will stick to the $200 price range at launch, but still include a range of new performance features.
For one, the Radeon HD 3800 will be the first graphics processor on the market with support for Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1, which offers real-time global illumination for better shadows, updated shader models, improved anti-aliasing and more flexible data access. Like the last iterations of the Radeon HD, the 3800 also offers support for ATI CrossfireX, allowing buyers to add up to four cards to a single system (with firmware upgrades slated for January 2008) and have the processing load shared among them.
Graphics media card maker ATI Technologies today unveiled a new Radeon graphics card focused towards gamers. The Radeon X800GTO is available now. The Radeon X800 GTO, ATI said, combines a 12-pipe 3D engine with 256-bitmemory interface and a memory data rate of up to 1Ghz. It offers an advanced 3D architecture which features pixel shading graphics technology. Other features ATI highlighted include advanced videoprocessing, filtering and acceleration to help make multimedia applications run more efficiently. "ATI’s new Radeon X800 GTO will let you get into the game and lose yourself in a trulyimmersive gaming experience with any of today’s top titles," said Rich Heye, Vice President and General Manager, Desktop Business Unit. "With the X800 GTO’s advanced technology, ATI onceagain brings gamers great performance, realism and value."
The RADEON X800, X800 XL and X850 Series visual processors originally debuted in December for PCI Express based systems. PCI Express is rapidly replacing AGP in new PC’s as the primary interconnecttechnology between the main processor and the graphics subsystem. These new AGP variants will allow users who have not yet upgraded to PCI Express to experience the same great performance and imagequality.
“The RADEON X800 XL and RADEON X850 products are perfect for gamers looking to upgrade their AGP systems to play the latest games,” said Rich Heye, Vice President and GM, Desktop Discrete Products, ATI Technologies Inc. “ATI will continue to deliver leading-edge graphics solutions like these for AGP as well as PCI Express to support the large install base.”
Addressing the needs of thin and light notebook PCs, Mobility Radeon X300 delivers the perfect blend of DirectX 9 performance and power management for consumer and commercial notebooks. At the other end of the spectrum, Mobility Radeon X800 is a 12 pixel pipeline mobile gaming powerhouse designed for today’s most visually intensive DirectX 9 games and applications.
“The market for mobile gaming platforms continues to grow rapidly, with users now able to enjoy the same level of 3D performance as high end desktop PCs,” said Robert Lusk, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Alienware. “By offering mobile systems based on Mobility Radeon we can offer a best-in-class mobile gaming experience with a highly scalable architecture to push DirectX 9 gaming performance to levels never thought possible.”
Delivering a gaming experience that is anything but mainstream, the RADEON X700 visual processing units (VPUs) include the advanced, cutting-edge features previously introduced in ATI’s RADEON X800family of VPUs and a higher level of performance than some of last year’s high-end visual processors, but for less than $200.
“The RADEON X700 has been designed to deliver amazing gaming performance in all of today’s popular games,” said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, PC Business Unit, ATI Technologies Inc. “It’s easy to perform well in one game, but the RADEON X700 demonstrates its rendering prowess by performing well in a wide spectrum of games. It also delivers industry leading image quality and multimedia features for customers who use their computers for a wider range of applications.”
Quote from the guide at Adrian’s Rojak Pot:
“While you will need a 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro if you want to mod the card into a true Radeon 9800XT, let’s not throw the 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro aside! If you are willing to forgo the extra 128MB of memory and support for OVERDRIVE and the temperature probe, the 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro offers great value, especially when you can mod it into a Radeon 9800XT!
Today, Sin22 will show you how to identify a R360 core in your 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro and how to flash it into a Radeon 9800XT! Come and learn how to unlock the R360 core in your Radeon 9800 Pro card!
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