No more NVIDIA exclusivity

Apr 6, 2009 07:41 GMT  ·  By

Albatron, a leading graphics card maker and a long-time NVIDIA-exclusive partner, has recently announced its first graphics accelerator that is based on an ATI graphics processing unit. With the announcement, the company launched its own version of AMD's latest Radeon HD 4890 GPU, coming to the market with AMD's fastest GPU to date. With the launch, Albatron joins all the other graphics card vendors that gave up on their NVIDIA exclusivity and debuted their own Radeon graphics cards.

Sometime last year, after the launch of AMD's successful line of Radeon 4000-series GPUs, graphics card vendors that were previously NVIDIA-exclusive partners started rolling out new graphics cards based on AMD's new line of GPUs. At that point the main reason for their decision was that the new Radeon cards were capable of delivering an impressive performance in an affordable package, making them a serious competitor for NVIDIA's cards. From a business standpoint, the decision was understandable, consequently enabling AMD to gain a better market share over that of its competitor.

Last year, Gainward and XFX dropped their NVIDIA exclusivity, much like Albatron has done now, with the launch of their first Radeon graphics card. The new Albatron card comes just days after the official introduction of AMD's highly anticipated RV790-based Radeon HD 4890 GPU, its fastest, single-GPU graphics solution currently available on the market.

Albatron's new card is pretty much based on AMD's reference design, featuring 1GB of GDDR5 memory and a core speed of 850MHz. The card's memory is clocked at 3900MHz, while the card itself has been designed with the dual-slot cooling solution you will find on all Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerators that are based on AMD's reference design.

No word on the pricing and availability of Albatron's new card, but it should soon hit the stores, as AMD succeeded in making the new cards available at launch.