14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has certainly seen some good days with the launch of its Radeon 4000 series graphics processing units, but the company is yet to provide a product that will seriously threaten NVIDIA's position in the graphics card market, especially since NVIDIA's latest cards have claimed the number one spot in the highest performance single GPU and dual GPU market segments. According to the latest rumors on the Internet, the Sunnyvale, California-based AMD might be preparing the launch of a new Radeon HD4890 graphics card for sometime in April this year.
As a recent article published on vr-zone shows, AMD has built the Radeon HD4890 using the RV790 core, which means that earlier rumors indicating AMD's plans to release the Radeon HD4970 were incorrect. It appears that the RV790XT GPU will be featured with a clock speed of 850MHz, and an operating voltage of 1.3V.
The said card will combine the 850MHz graphics processing unit with a 975MHz GDDR5 memory, which should enable it to provide an increased performance level compared with the Radeon HD4870, which is based on the RV770 GPU, runs at 750MHz and has a memory clock of 900MHz.
In addition, it looks like there will be two versions of the said card, one of which will provide an overclocked GPU. Apparently, this card is slated to debut at the end of April and will boast 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The card is expected to provide a performance boost of 25-30% over the performances achieved by the current HD 4870 version. What is likely more impressive is that the card should be launched with a price tag of US$299.
Such rumors are yet to be confirmed by the company and the specifications and details on the card may change.