Despite a little mishap due to early Radeon HD 4850 sales last week it is today that AMD has officially introduced the Radeon HD 4800 series cards. Coming with at least 1 TeraFlop of (peak) performance, the new cards are powered by the fresh and funky RV770 chip built on 55nm by TSMC and feature DirectX 10.1 support, PCI-Express 2.0 and 256-bit memory interfaces.

"The ATI Radeon 4800 series represents a 2X performance jump over the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU, the biggest generational increase since the game-changing launch of the Radeon 9700 in 2002," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "AMD made a strategic decision to focus on GPU designs that maximized our efficiency and allowed us to provide enthusiasts, performance and mainstream users with the most compelling value proposition at every price point. The ATI Radeon 4800 series sets a new industry standard in key metrics such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar."

Loaded with 800 Stream Processors, the Radeon HD 4850 features a stock GPU clock of 625 MHz and 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 1994 MHz, has a single-slot cooling solution and hovers around the $199 price point. Also offering 800 SPs, the higher-end Radeon HD 4870 requires additional power from two 6-pin PCIe connectors and has a dual-slot heatsink but it can brag with a 750 MHz GPU clock and 512MB of GDDR5 memory set to a massively sweet 3600 MHz. This one has a recommended price tag of $299.

In terms of manufacturer support, the Radeon HD 4800 series can safely say it is backed up by big names like ASUS, PowerColor, MSI, Gigabyte, GECUBE, Force3D, Sapphire Technology, Diamond Multimedia, Club 3D, HIS and Palit Multimedia.

You can read a few early Radeon HD 4850 articles by checking out this page.

Radeon HD 4850



Radeon HD 4870



RV770 wafer