ATI Radeon HD 4870
Radeon HD 4870 will officially be launched tomorrow and. from what several sites report. It looks like this card is going to be up to 30% faster, while still cheaper than the 3870X2.
Apparently, the GDDR5 memory found on the 4870 model works at 900MHz basic frequency. However, the GDDR5 memories will benefit from the quad data rate architecture that results into an impressive bandwidth and speed of 3600MHz effectively. The 512Mb GDDR5 chips that ATI implemented in the new 4800 family have 3.6GB/s throughput or double what would GDDR 3 or 4 have at the same 900MHz speed.
The Radeon HD 4870 is going to primarily ship with 512MB onboard, amounting to eight 512Mbit chips. Later on, GPU integrators will be adding 1GB GDDR5 or as much as sixteen memory chips, but this will probably have to wait some more, as GDDR5 module availability suffers from early shortages.
Extrapolating what we know about the 4870 and the already available 4850 model, Fudzilla came to the conclusion that the 4870 will end up with almost twice as much bandwidth than the 4850, meaning around 115GB/s in total. Not to mention that 4870 and the entire 4800 family still supports 7.1 audio acceleration.
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I’m definitely going to be one of the first to buy one of these.