Back when we did our review on the Crossfire 4870’s, we were left utterly impressed by the sheer amount of productivity and results that provided for an effulgence of gaming pleasure over even the latest of the Nvidia offering of the GTX 280’s and GTX 260’s with value of power and price. It seems AMD is setting the barriers this generation, and trying to cross them over and over again. With the introduction of the HD 4850 1GB and HD 4870 1GB, AMD had amped up the offering for the initial consumer price point models. Now, they’ve just broken their own barrier with the latest innovation of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 series. As the first consumer graphics card with 2 GB of memory, and the first card to implement a 512bit GDDR5 memory architecture through the inordinate amount of pixel pipelines, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card stoically dominates the competition in a whole new level for the enthusiast gamers.

We wanted to make something people can love, and feel secure with. - Dirk Meyer, President, AMD: Commenting to WhatIfGaming on the HD 4870 X2 card.

The Radeon 4800 series has many people excited since we published our review on the 4850 to our in-depth exclusive reveal first on the 4870. Now, today we bring a review on the 4870 with dual goodness. That’s right. We have 2 of these powerhouses from AMD, which reveals the introduction of the highly desirable and now most successful GDDR5 memory architecture. A complete power machine, the ATI Radeon 4870 is the most valuable card to date in terms of the Radeon evolution and Ruby keeps looking sexier by the minute. Stable temperatures, amazing performance on all DX 10.1 games with many XGA resolutions, make not only a very formidable card series in general, but a great contender as the 4870 and one that is set out to win against the competition this time around.

So, on with it. What’s the latest ATI Radeon 4800 series all about? What is the texel stream rate and all of that? WhatIfGaming is here to go over the ATI Radeon 4800 Series in depth. The ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series of GPUs in short brings the power of supercomputing to gamers, setting a new standard for visual computing and redefining the way gamers play and take HD gaming to a whole new level. The new TeraScale graphics engine delivers an immersing gaming experience. Add this GPU to your PC and watch Blu-ray movies and play HD content with great visual fidelity (HD Monitor capable of a resolution of 1920×1080 or greater). Best of all– it’s all break-through efficiency that doesn’t compromise performance for power.

The powerful new TeraScale graphics will propel you deep into your game play with seamless frame rates and high resolutions. With it, enhanced anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering allow unparalleled realism to max out the settings of the most demanding next-generation games. Below are the key 4800 series summary highlights we put together:

Enhanced Anti-Aliasing & Anisotropic Filtering
High performance anisotropic filtering and 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
DirectX 10.1
Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities.
ATI CrossFireX Technology
ATI CrossFireX technology with up to quad GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are.
PCI Express 2.0
Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.

Unified Video Decoder 2
Unified Video Decoder 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for even the most processing-intensive content, including VC-1, H.264 and now MPEG-2. Also, take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities (done in order to adhere to Blu-Ray standards).

Upscale Beyond 1080p
Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution and beyond.
On-chip HDCP
On-chip HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) makes life easier by allowing you to playback HDCP protected content.
HDMI
HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of color when connected to a capable HDTV.

Best of all? DX 10.1 support. That’s right. Unlike the newer GTX 280 line, the entire 4800 series supports DX 10.1 fully with tessellation and Gather4 texture fetching.

Let’s go into the 4800 Series features now in detail through a summary.

AMD is proudly bringing PC gamers 1.0 TeraFLOP Graphics Performance, with a single GPU that consumes only 110W of power in the HD 4850. Going head to head with the 8800GTX, 8800GTS & GT, and 9600GT series of cards. Developing a new TeraScale graphics engine, AMD is excited to deliver an impassive experience for gaming. With enhanced anti-aliasing 24X (AA) and AF, gamers will find a new realism more improved than previous versions of cards that all had AA and AF flickering sporadic problems. You’ve read our Cinema 2.0 coverage and are waiting for our detailed article on the latest 4800 series line, including ATI Radeon HD 4870 details. Now, we want to reveal one part with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 that should provide a glimpse into the new series line. With power that supports DX 10.1 fully unlike the GTX 200’s, the ATI Radeon HD 4850 brings efficiency together against the competition through features such as ATI Powerplay and ATI Avivo HD to give gamers a more enhanced experience all around.

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Everyone wants a good flight so they can remember a great experience later on. Airports have that smell to them. It’s known, but we abnegate from our area of stance anyways and let our nose be the guide. Flight 1171 from LAX to SFO. Close, just have to wait in the long line. That’s when you aggregate all the flights into one spot: “Stand there,” or “wait there’s” aside. Regardless, you always have the smell of those aviator gases. It’s going to be a delightful trip to AMD’s Cinema 2.0 premiere.

The walk to boarding 70A is simple enough, a wonder of lights to the event so we can all reflect on the beginning. Last year launch, AMD sought to break their traditional graphical mark and break into the immeasurable society of mainstream consum..”Hi, checking in,” I say with a penchant smile. OK, so it wasn’t really a smile as it was a smirk. Boarding through, the air hostess is standing frigid with coffee. No one is giving the way. Like a gentleman, I step aside and everything carries on. It’s that time again. When I do the penguin march to the seat. Placing gently in to the center, I am greeted by the decor of two businessmen. One is clearly a health specialist, AMCA pen and everything. The other is a company manager with an air of fatigue, window closed, purple strand tie whizzing about. Stepping away, AMD was making a push fast to mainstream consumers. With the launch of the extensive 3000 series, things are looking up to the eager public. Now, after an entire year, WhatIfGaming is anxious to see what they have up their sleeve this time. The CG poly comparison to real time graphics back in January had us on our creative pens throes. As the aircraft lifts, the city slowly fades. The clouds slowly engulf the pier, and there’s nothing else to do but focus ahead on the so called revolution in graphics: Cinema 2.0. And of course, the bobble heads (people) in the other seats.

A few months ago, AMD held a very short closed door sneak peak conference to show a teaser of their upcoming aims for the future, clenching the very satchel to break free from technological limits in graphics hoping to fulfill their goals. Soon, WhatIfGaming will have all the details regarding AMD’s announced upcoming breakthrough to the fast paced mouth drools of the technology sector. We won’t reveal everything just yet, but sit with your eyes glued to the monitor.

The timer has changed to reflect the countdown of the details. At ease hardware enthusiasts, Hollywood is a reflex away.

Wahh wahh. We got word that the Radeon 4800 series line launch was going to be delayed, and decided to check in with some people ourselves. Computex correspondents Brett Rackner for WhatIfGaming poses the following question to AMD PR after the AMD press briefing earlier today.

It’s really a matter of where we want to be. We want to launch when the time is right, and that’s all we can say about it. Keep an eye on June 23rd.

OK. So it happens. But it makes sense given Nvidia’s launch strategy. The GDDR5 equipped 4870 will launch at the same time as the 4850 512MB GDDR3, and people will be waiting. Don’t worry.

The 8800 GTX has represented the most powerful graphics card that sane people were willing to buy for years. The 8800 Ultra is slightly faster, but at a cost of over $600 it is reserved for those with gross amounts of disposable income. From the start, we were able to run SLI ATX and get incredible performance. Nowadays the GTX is starting to become long in the tooth as far as graphics cards go, 15 months is a very long time with nothing faster to come along. The latest games are certainly pushing even a pair of GTX’s to unplayable levels at higher resolutions. So what are we owners of 30” LCD monitors to do to get playable frames at our native resolution? Enter 3-way SLI, a fully functional and much sorted extension of the Quad SLI. NVIDIA has been hard at work on multi-GPU performance and with the limitation of only 3fps pre-render in Direct X9 and below out of the way in Direct X10, the stage is set for extremely expensive graphics solutions. For those who do not remember, Quad SLI was plagued by the fact that for the money, it was a horrible investment. It offered very marginal performance benefits in all but a select few applications and thus never adopted as the true high-end solution.

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Today we are testing the new ASUS EAH3850 TOP and EN8800GS TOP graphics cards in a head to head comparison. These $200 US graphics cards deliver serious performance and come with overclocked factory settings, and improved cooling solutions. We expect more from GPU manufacturers this time around. The most recent card we have with us today is the GeForce 9600 GT, which tunes in great. But alas, there is tons of competition on the other brim as the HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards have also been able to remain very competitive. Currently the Radeon HD 3870 is priced between $190-$200 US while the GeForce 9600 GT costs roughly $170-$180 US, and both produce very similar results.

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Making your own computers costs a lot. We can write about amped up stuff, but this is different. This is the market that ECS is reaching for with moderate end solutions—yet remaining very close to the GTX

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ATI has been busy the past couple months getting the Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series out the door and today is the day! ATI has moved on to the 55nm process which is an improvement over the 65nm manufacturing process and both the Radeon HD 3650 and 3450 are built on the new process. You might have heard rumors about these video cards under the code names RV620 and RV635, but now that they are official they have been given real product names. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon 3450/3470 cards all range between $49 and $99 so they are competitively priced entry-level DirectX 10.1 compliant GPUs that offer full UVD support with all the latest technology that ATI uses.

The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is the direct replacement for the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro as you can tell. The ATI Radeon HD 3650 is active cooled with a core clock of 725MHz and a memory clock of 800MHz and will be available with two kinds of memory ICs - GDDR3 and GDDR2. The slower and older GDDR2 memory chips will be used on the $79 price point cards, while the $99 cards will feature faster GDDR3 memory ICs. The reference Radeon HD 3650 that we have today uses GDDR3 memory IC’s, so it is the $99 card. The faster clock speed and memory frequencies improve the memory bandwidth and math processing rate on the Radeon HD 3650 when compared to the older Radeon HD 2600 Pro. Also keep in mind that both the Radeon 3400 series and 3600 series are PCI Express 2.0 compliant and support DirectX 10.1 features as well as ATI PowerPlay software.

LightsMark Demo Results:

Lightsmark 2007 v1.3 showed the ATI Radeon HD 3650 doing pretty well against the ATI Radeon 3850 256MB and was able to turn in good numbers at even 1920×1200. The Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 needs more muscle to break 30FPS, but it was close.

The ATI Radeon HD 3650 and Radeon HD 3450 didn’t turn in great benchmark results, but at $49-$99 these are entry level cards and aren’t supposed to be geared at hard-core gamers. At lower resoltions with low quality settings they will easily play older DirectX 9 games, but as you saw in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. benchmark section DirectX 9 games with high quality settings are still demanding on graphics cards. If you are looking for gaming performance the ATI Radeon HD 3850 is leaps and bounds a better choice.