ATI Launches 'Fastest and Most Powerful Graphics Card Available Today'

The dual-GPU card packs two HD 4800 graphic chips, said to provide "2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU power," and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. To illustrate the card's performance, ATI provided the above benchmarks, comparing the HD 4870 X2 to rival Nvidia's GTX 280.

At present, the HD 4870 X2 is only available from online system builders such as Alienware and Falcon Northwest, carrying a suggested price of $549, with the card expected to hit retailers shortly.

A pared-down version that sports 1GB of GDDR3 memory, dubbed the Radeon HD 4850 X2, is slated to hit in September for around $399, according to TechReport.

Complete details on 4870 X2 and the benchmark machine follow:

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Features:

2 GB of GDDR5 memory
2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU power
DirectX 10.1
1600 stream processing units
2 x 256-bit memory interface
24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
Dual mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
PCI Express 2.0 support
Dynamic geometry acceleration
Game physics processing capability
ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
DVD Upscaling
Dynamic Contrast
Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
Integrated DisplayPort
Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology

Benchmark Machine Specs:

Drivers
ATI: 8.501.1 Sample_vista_HD_4800_Series_4
NVIDIA: 175.35 WHQL
System Configurations
AMD Phenom X4 9950 (2.6GHz)
MSI K9A2 (790FX)/ASUS M3N-HT DLX (780a)
4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18
Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit

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