This summer is certainly going to be a hot one in the graphics card's market. The two major rivals, AMD and nVIDIA, continue their fierce battle in order to get the big prizes in performance and sales, with AMD definitely wanting it's lost market share back, since the company is behind nVIDIA in sales figures for a long time. It's opponent on the other hand, must satisfy it's customers in order to maintain it's place at the top of the external graphics card market, a task not so easy as it may seem.
The success nVIDIA had with the infamous 8800GT is something hard to repeat. At that time, AMD had only the hot and noisy 2900 series in the market and nVIDIA took advantage of that in the best way possible. At this time, nVIDIA has already released it's new series, with the flagship card being the GeForce GTX 280. The first reviews though, were not very encouraging for the company, and it seems that the costumers didn't rush to buy the new cards, but are eagerly waiting for AMD's responce. To balance things in favor of nVIDIA, it's marketing department has promoted CUDA a lot, explaining why this new technology will bring a revolution to our PCs, and of course, as many have already heard, has promised to deliver a new version of the 9800 GTX, the GeForce 9800 GTX+.
AMD on the contrary, remained silent. Before the launch of the new GTX 260 and 280, the company announced the delay of it's own card, the ATi Radeon HD 4850, which was a disappointment for many costumers and fans. Suddenly though, AMD decided to end the NDA 6 days earlier than planned and the cards were flooding the market, at a very low and reasonable price. The first samples of the card's performance were almost excellent - this little thing proved to hide a beast inside, unfolding it's power in our PCs, making the costumers all too happy. The reason is fairly simple - in the PC Gaming and PC Enthusiasts community, most motherboards have chipsets made by Intel for the Core 2 platform. These chipsets, support CrossFireX in their most part, which makes this card ideal for use in Multi-GPU solutions.
Here are the specs of AMD/ATi’s new graphics card:
So, will this new card be a good choice for our computers? Does it perform as good as we hear? How well does CrossFire perform with the use of two or more cards? Should someone buy the 4850 right now or should he wait for the new and improved version, the ATi Radeon HD 4870, which will feature a Dual-Slot cooler and GDDR5 VRAM?
You only have to read the rest of our Review in order to find out!
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