14 DAY TRIAL // This year, AMD's graphics subsidiary, ATI, succeeded in finally introducing the world to a new graphics card capable of being a serious competitor for NVIDIA's latest GeForce lineup. In addition, the company also managed to steal the performance crown from the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker, with the release of the dual-chip Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card. With all that, it appears that ATI still has an ace up its sleeve, and that it might unveil it even before the end of this year.
Unfortunately, details regarding this are not very clear at this time, but according to a news article on TechPowerUp, ATI is expected to release a new Radeon graphics processing unit, codenamed RV790. This GPU is believed to power a new graphics card that could be part of the company's current HD 4000-series lineup.
The differences between said RV790 chip and the current RV770 will allow AMD's upcoming graphics card to deliver clock speeds higher than the 750MHz on the HD 4870 card. This will boost the card's performance and enable AMD to hold on to the supremacy on the high-performance market, even with the upcoming release of NVIDIA's GT200b GPU, a refresh to the company's current GT200.
As noted above, there aren't any specific technical details available related to the upcoming card, as ATI is yet to confirm such a product. Still, the rumor is based on the presumption that ATI plans to keep its current market position, if not improve it, which is why it will need a product to compete with the upcoming 55nm GPUs from NVIDIA.
Whether the RV790 chip is going to be introduced officially and separately from the company's current range of Radeon solutions is yet uncertain at this point in time, as also is whether ATI will just redesign its RV770 so as to enable it to support higher clock speeds for improved performance. This is a regular practice for ATI, as the company also did so with its R300, R350 and R360 GPUs, which were basically the same chip but with different clock speeds.
It is also likely for said RV790 to never see the light of day, if NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce cards can't rise to the performance achieved by ATI's current Radeon lineup.