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.
Like many manufacturers, AMD has also jumped on board with the green way of thinking, and the Radeon HD 3800 supposedly offers twice the performance-per-watt of previous generation AMD GPUs, thanks to a more efficient 55nm processor that runs cooler.
The base level Radeon HD 3850 will get 256MB of GDDR2 memory and a price of $179, while the higher-level HD 3870 will get 512MB GDDR4 memory at a price of $219.
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