AMD Officially Rolls Out the ATI Radeon HD 4890

Sunnyvale, California-based AMD has officially announced today its new Radeon graphics card, the RV790-based Radeon HD 4890. With the launch, the chip maker claims that its new card is powered by the world's most powerful graphics processors, according to internal testing. The card itself is featured with the latest GDDR5 memory, a high-frequency GPU clock, DirectX 10.1 support and a whopping 1.36 TeraFLOPs of compute power. In addition, according to AMD, the latest addition to its Radeon graphics lineup is capable of reaching a GPU clock of nearly 1GHz.

“The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card represents the AMD sweet spot strategy reloaded,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “With last year’s launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 products, we gave gamers great performance and an incredible value proposition. Today, we’re doing it again. ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards are incredible performers, priced to sell in all major markets worldwide.”

As it has been said for a while now, thanks to all the leaked details that have surfaced on the Internet prior to the release of AMD's new graphics card, the Radeon HD 4890 is built with 956 million transistors on the now-familiar 55nm fabrication process. The card is featured with a PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface, 256-bit GDDR5 memory, support for Microsoft's DirectX 10.1, Shader Model 4.1, OpenGL 3.0 support and 800 stream processing units.

The card's clock rates have been set to the highly expected 850MHz for the GPU and 975MHz for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory. With this boost the Radeon HD4890 is placed between the company's Radeon HD 4870 and the dual-GPU 4870 X2, offering a range of specifications that are highly similar to AMD's previous single GPU flagship model. Price-wise, the card is immediately available for a MSRP of US$249, while at select retailers it can go for as little as US$229, according to the chip maker.