14 DAY TRIAL // It seems like AMD's graphics subsidiary is receiving an impressive amount of attention from the online media. Unlike in the previous years, the latest news places ATI in a very favorable light, something that the red team hasn't seen in years. The most recent reports coming in talk about a number of Radeon graphics cards that are expected to be released in September this year.
According to the rumors, the chip manufacturer is going to release an X2 version of its mid-range HD 4850 graphics card, one that will be a bit cheaper compared with the HD 4870 X2, but will also provide a lower performance level. The card hasn't been officially confirmed by any AMD official but, according to statements made by AMD's Raja Koudri, worldwide CTO (Products Group), chances are it might happen sometime in the future.
Featuring two of ATI's RV770Pro GPUs, the new card will be branded as the Radeon HD 4850 X2. It is expected that it will be selling for approximately $449 at launch. This is roughly with $100 less than the Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB, a fact that is explainable by that the 4850 X2 will end up slower, being designed to accommodate a maximum of 2GB of GDDR3 memory (compared with the GDDR5 memory chips on the 4870 X2). As with the "Spartan," the HD 4850 X2 card will probably also get a 1GB version, which will be built by ATI's partners.
September is also when the HD 3xxx-series of graphics cards will reach the end of life status, making way for a number of new HD 4000-series graphics cards. This includes the Radeon 3870 X2, 3870, 3850, 3650, 3470 and 3450 but bear in mind that this doesn't necessarily mean that they will stop being available purchase from various retailers. In fact, you might want to wait until late September if you want to improve your CrossFire-enabled computer system with an additional Radeon 3000 generation card, because chances are the prices for these card will drop significantly.
AMD is going to replace the HD 3xxx-series with a number of 4000-series Radeons, one of which will be based on the RV710 chip. The RV710-enabled cards will cost somewhere in the $69 to $99 range, and will top the HD 3450 in terms of performance. As of now, details on this are scare, but reports indicate that the cheapest model will come with 256MB of memory, while the most expensive $99 model will sport 512MB of graphics memory.