14 DAY TRIAL // If you recently had the chance to read a review of one of ATI's upcoming Radeon 4850 graphics cards, then you should know that AMD approves of these reviews. And this is because users can already acquire the company's HD 4000 series cards in most of the countries in Europe and even Israel and some of them have already posted their impressions and benchmark results on various websites.
Apparently, AMD has lost control of the situation and because of this it has decided to remove the NDA for sites reviewing these cards. So if you have one of these HD 4850 cards, AMD is OK with you publishing some "early numbers". Unfortunately the rest of us mortal users, for whom such cards are not within reach yet, will just have to wait until next week, when AMD's next-generation Radeons get the official treatment.
As we have already told you, a high number of Radeon 4850 cards have already been sold across the world and AMD has no way of controlling this. It seems that distributors and shops received these cards between three and one week ago and that they were just waiting for ATI's final OK.
One other rumored reason for this ongoing situation is that big customers have requested AMD to pull the launch date since, apparently, a high number of users are buying more Radeon 4870 and 4850 graphics cards than was originally expected. One can only presume that AMD didn't even hope that their new RV770-based lineup would be so successful, but then again who did?
Most people expected the new Radeon lineup to get less attention than NVIDIA's next-generation GT200 series graphics cards, but it seems that the small price tag along with the fact that these cards can provide some impressive benchmark results in a CrossFireX setup make for AMD's success formula.