The battle for the $200+ price point is heating up as AMD has decided to release the Radeon HD 4890 earlier than expected. Previously set for an official launch in the second week of April, the RV790-powered card is now planned to debut on April 2nd, four days before the rumored arrival of its rival, the GeForce GTX 275.

The Radeon HD 4890, which in its stock form features a 850 MHz GPU, 800 Stream Processors and 1GB of GDDR5 memory @ 3900 MHz, has already started selling in several places around the world so a hard launch next week is pretty much guaranteed.