AMD have announced that they will soon be launching their next generation of Radeon graphics cards - the Radeon 4800 series - around June. It had been expected this month, and the new date - routed to be around Week 25, which places it between June 15th and 22nd means it will debut after the launch of Nvidia's GT200 chip when it had been previously expected that AMD would beat Nvidia to the punch.
There are three models expected of the 4800 series - the 4850 (codenamed 'Makedon'), 4870 and 4870 X2. The 4850 is expected to be the first to hit the shelves, and featuring 512MB of GDDR3 RAM, it should be available in quantity and will replace the Radeon 3850 graphics card. It is also expected to feature a single slot cooling solution, and will be Crossfire X compatible.
The Radeon 4870 graphics card will be released in July, featuring 512MB GDDR5 RAM while the X2 version will be fitted with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM.
Other key aspects of the new card will be AMD's GPGPU physics processing and improved HD video decoding. Some models will also be able to route 7.1 surround sound via HDMI.
Given the prices touted for the launch - the 4850 should retail around the $200 mark - it seems that AMD are making a concerted effort to gain market share in the mid-range graphics card market and appeal to those buyers looking to balance performance with price. It'll be interesting to see how Nvidia react
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May 18 2008, 12:43 PM