Radeon 4000 series: Technical details dissected

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 11 Feb 2012 at 17:59

ATI has released the technical details of its latest series of graphics cards, revealing some staggering numbers.

Read our full review of the technical details of ATI's next generation of cards here.

We took a first look at the ATI Radeon HD 4850 last week, and were impressed by a card that offered huge performance for the price, and took the fight firmly back to Nvidia.

However, AMD has now released the full technical details of the new RV770 GPU underpinning the Radeon HD 4850, and its big brother the HD4870, which is due for release today and will feature 512MB of GDDR5 memory, as opposed to the GDDR3 used in the 4850.

Among the significant changes, the RV770 GPU has received a huge bump in shaders, up from 320 on the HD 3870, to 800 on the new cards, accounting for the massive performance increase.

The cards also support GDDR5 memory, improved Crossfire performance and a few price surprises which look likely to give Nvidia a few sleepless nights over the next few months.