AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2 Slated for an August Release

It appears that AMD's upcoming graphics monster is still on for an August release, contrary to the rumors we told you about just yesterday. Apparently, AMD will not go official with its new graphics card until next month, which means that enthusiast users will have to wait for a while longer before getting to purchase the new Radeon card.

Yesterday, we brought you news according to which AMD's upcoming graphics card, codenamed R700, was expected to be released on July 14, which is next Monday. While that might have been registered as a pleasant surprise by some of the fans of the company, recent developments show that AMD is not really planning to release the card that soon. In fact, all those who already went through the trouble of putting some money aside for a new acquisition will have to hold on to it until August 12, when Micro Devices will finally bring its new high-end Radeon into the spotlight.

Once the new card hits the market, everybody expects the performance crown to switch from Santa Clara to Sunnyvale. This means that AMD is poised to become the leading manufacturer of graphics cards, a title that the company has been going after for quite some time now. However, even if that does occur and AMD succeeds in providing the world with the highest-performance graphic card, NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce lineup will most certainly try to set the performance bar even further than that.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that there are no official details concerning the technical specifications of the R700 card, some of the ongoing rumors have it as featuring two RV770 GPUs on a single PCB. The card, which will also be known under the dubbing the Spartan, will apparently offer the power of 1600 Stream Processors and 2GB of GDDR5 memory, with a 2 x 256-bit memory interface. It will also support DirectX 10.1, although some might believe this to be unnecessary, as Microsoft is said to jump directly to DirectX 11 for its graphics API.

The R700 will be quite expensive, which means that only a couple of enthusiast users, who are in the habit of going all out there just to have the latest in computer technology, will be actually able to purchase it.