More Details on ATI's Upcoming HD 4000 Series Surface

Just in case you have recently found yourself wondering about the specs for ATI's next-generation HD 4000 series graphics cards, and you couldn't bring yourself to summarize all the articles we brought to you this past month, we now offer a more detailed piece on ATI's future graphics card lineup.

The new HD 4000 series is expected to come in two variants, each one offering graphics support to a different type of consumer. If the high-end HD 4870 is expected to provide users with a high-performance level of graphics, the HD 4850 is designed to be more affordable but, at the same time, lower on the performance scale when compared to its high-end counterpart.

Pictures of the HD 4850 graphics card, stripped down of its cooler, have surfaced the web during this year's Computex show. Recently, more details concerning the RV770-based graphics cards have also popped all over the Internet. From what we have seen so far it seems that the cards, which are expected to come out officially next week, or in two weeks from now, will also come with some impressive technical specifications.

Both HD 4870 and HD 4850 are expected to include a whopping 800 Shaders. This is considerable higher than what we got in ATI's previous generation, which only had 320 Shaders. With a little math, we see that this also makes the HD 4000 series provide more than double the Shaders number. The 800 Shaders are going to be clocked at 625MHz, making the Radeon HD 4850 capable of reaching 1000 GigaFlops or 1 TeraFlop. Again, this means that the HD 4870 will reach 1.2 TeraFlops.

Keep in mind that these cards have GPU clock speeds slower than their current counterparts. The HD 4850 is expected to run at 625MHz (while the HD 3850 comes with a standard core speed of 670MHz), while the HD 4870 will have a standard clock speed of 750MHz, slower than the HD 3870, which comes clocked at 775MHz.

The numbers are impressive, as expected with all new products, but there still are doubts concerning the graphics capability of the new Radeons. One thing we can't tell at the moment is whether ATI is going to become a real competitor for NVIDIA in the high-performance market.