ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series GPUs are the strength of the "Dragon" platform
- bringing the power of graphics 'supercomputing' to gamers and setting a new standard
for visual computing. Redefine the way you play and take HD gaming1 to
the extreme with best-in-class performance. Get ready to take your experience to
another level with new multimedia capabilities and break-through efficiency that
doesn't compromise performance.
Redefine the Way You GAME!
With more than twice the processing power of previous generation AMD discrete graphics
cards, ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series graphics cards deliver a cinematic gaming
experience and unprecedented performance.
The new TeraScale graphics engine combines the power of up to 1.36 teraFLOPS, up
to 800 stream processors and next generation GDDR52 memory to propel
you deep into your gameplay with seamless frame rates and high resolutions.
Enhanced anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) create striking graphics
with unparalleled realism so you can max out the settings of the most demanding
next-generation games or revitalize your favorite titles.
Play today while preparing for tomorrow with tessellation, support for DirectX®
10.1 and scalable ATI CrossFireX™ technology3.
Go Beyond HD Video
Add an ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series graphics card to your PC and watch the latest
Blu-ray and HD movies play with incredible fidelity1 – upscale to nearly
twice the display resolution of HD content4.
Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture
(PIP) capabilities.
Sophisticated new features within ATI Avivo™ HD technology give you the freedom
and flexibility to edit videos quickly and convert them to H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
1.8x faster than real-time5.
Support for the latest audio visual interconnects ensures you can take advantage
of the latest display technology.
Break-through Efficiency
Like their predecessors, the ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series graphics cards offer
optimal performance and break-through efficiency with platform-independent intelligent
power management.
Regardless of platform, these graphics cards deliver the power needed to blaze through
even the most intense games while intuitively conserving energy at idle or when
demand is low.
- HD capable monitor required
- On select models. See manufacturer specifications.
- ATI CrossFireX™ technology requires an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and
may require a specialized power supply.
- The ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series GPUs can upscale video display to 2560x1600
on dual-link monitors which is almost twice the display resolution of 1080p displays.
- This may vary depending on your system configuration and video formats. Using an
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHz based PC, AMD was able to achieve GPU accelerated
transcoding speeds up to 19x faster using Cyberlink PowerDirector than when using
the same CPU alone with MainConcept encoder in Adobe Premiere CS3. Using the same
system, full 1080p files were converted 1.8x faster than real-time.
- ATI PowerPlay™ is a technology platform that includes a broad set of capabilities
offered by certain ATI Radeon GPUs. Not all ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 series graphics
cards have all features.
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Feature Summary – Part 1
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express® 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3/4/5 memory interface
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1
- 32-bit floating point texture filtering
- Indexed cube map arrays
- Independent blend modes per render target
- Pixel coverage sample masking
- Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
- Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
- 800 stream processing units
- Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
- Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
- Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
- 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
- Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
- Shader instruction and constant caches
- Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
- Up to 128 textures per pixel
- Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
- DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
- High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
- Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
- Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
- Early Z test and Fast Z Clear
- Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
- Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
- Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
- Accelerated physics processing
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
- High performance vertex cache
- Programmable tessellation unit
- Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
- Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
- Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
- Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
- Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
- Gamma correct
- Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
- All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
- 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per
pixel)
- 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
- sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
- Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
- Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
- Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
1. Dual channel interconnect is not required for ATI CrossFireX™, and may
not be included in all product configurations.
2. Some custom resolutions require user configuration.
3. Playing HDCP content requires additional HDCP ready components, including but
not limited to an HDCP ready monitor, Blu-ray or HD DVD disc drive, multimedia application
and computer operating system.
4. Subject to digital rights management limitations; maximum supported audio stream
bandwidth is 6.144 Mbps.
5. ATI PowerPlay™ technology consists of numerous power saving features. Not
all features may be available in all ATI Radeon™ HD 4800 Series graphics cards.
6. ATI Avivo™ HD is a technology platform that includes a broad set of capabilities
offered by certain ATI Radeon™ HD GPUs. Not all products have all features
and full enablement of some ATI Avivo™ HD capabilities may require complementary
products.
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Cinema 2.0: The Next Chapter in the Ultimate Visual Experience™ Story
Movies today rely on digital effects that look like real worlds no matter how fantastically
imagined. The most successful games today, in turn, give us movie-like storylines
with rich 3D interactivity. But just as movies today don’t provide audience interactivity,
games still fall short of delivering movie-like realism.
On June 16, 2008, AMD demonstrated a milestone achievement in ultra-realistic and
interactive visual computing through the processing power of its forthcoming "RV770"
codenamed teraFLOPS graphics chip.
The demonstration of what AMD terms the "Cinema 2.0 Experience" punches a sizeable
hole in the sensory barrier between today’s visionary content creators and the experiences
they desire to create for audiences around the world. The Cinema 2.0 demo showed
the fusion of dynamic real-time interactivity with convincing cinematic digital
effects that appear to be real places and things captured on video.
AMD this summer plans to introduce the world’s highest performing graphics processor
ever – a chip more powerful than every generation of video game console ever brought
to market combined, with one full teraFLOPS of processing power per chip.
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ATI Icon "Ruby" Stars in the First-Ever Cinema 2.0 Experience.
Rendered in real-time and interactive, this is a brief video from the first Cinema
2.0 demo, premiered by AMD in San Francisco on June 16, 2008. The interactive demo
was rendered by a single PC equipped with two "RV770" codenamed graphics cards powered
by an AMD Phenom™ X4 9850 Processor and AMD 790FX Chipset. The full demo shows
cinema-quality digital images rendered in real-time with interactivity. Check back
later this summer for a video of the full Ruby Cinema 2.0 demo.
Launch video (0:11)
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Some of the Brightest Game Developers Discuss the Quest for Cinema 2.0 in the Game
Industry.
With past and future game credits ranging from Crysis® to Enemy Territory: Quake
Wars™ to Rogue Trooper™ to The Outsider™ to Alan Wake™,
some of the brightest game developers discuss Cinema 2.0. While their opinions range
from three, to five, to 10 years of development until the first Cinema 2.0-quality
games, all agree that faster graphics hardware is essential to accelerate that inevitable
but elusive level of game realism.
Launch video (3:12)
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Professional Gamers Contemplate the Cinema 2.0 Experience.
Professional gamers Cameron Hatzmann and "Frag Dolls" member Alyson Craghead envision
the Cinema 2.0 game play experience, anticipating that it will completely change
the way they look at games. But no matter how great the experience, it should be
affordable and energy efficient.
Launch video (2:13)
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A Timeline of Video Game Industry Innovations and Breakthroughs
From 1972 to 2007, this video shows highlight innovations in the video game industry:
wireframe 3D, polygons, the transition from 8- to 16- to 32-bit, and the addition
of high dynamic range lighting.
Launch video (1:30)
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Learn more about Cinema 2.0
"The Radeon HD 4890 GPU on the ASUS EAH4890 is a truly competitive product. As an
update to the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, it more than meets our expectations. As a product
to fill a massive price gap that has existed for months in the high performance
video card market, it is a formidable contender."
"Everything about the Radeon HD 4890, from the impressive engineering feats, to
the price, to the enthusiast nature and gameplay experience improvements easily
earns it a HardOCP Editor's Choice Gold Award!"
- Mark Warner, Brent Justice –
Hardocp.com
"It is not a completely new design, but the Radeon HD 4890 is an exciting product
nonetheless. To put it simply, the Radeon HD 4890 is the fastest, single-GPU powered
graphics card AMD has ever produced. And its competitive pricing and overclocking
headroom should further its appeal amongst enthusiasts."
- Marco Chiappetta –
Hot Hardware
"The HD 4890 offers very good, all-around performance, and is another great addition
to the HD 4800 series."
"While there will undoubtedly be something coming from NVIDIA in response to the
HD 4890, it is hard to imagine the HD 4890 not being up to the challenge. And while
the more price-sensitive video card buyers might be able to find a better-bang for
buck with some models than have been out a bit longer, the HD 4890 is a real contender
offering good value from the get-go, and is a nice (presumed) finish to the HD 4800
series."
- Kevin Spiess –
Neoseeker.com
"There is no doubt that the 4890 is an excellent product especially considering
the price."
"For a street price of $229 you really cant go wrong with the 4890. It becomes a
red hot deal when you throw in the natural ability for the 4890 to overclock like
mad and remain stable. Considering the performance, cost, and overclockability of
the this product, the 4890 earns the coveted Awesome Hardware Award."
- Jason Jacobs –
Techwarelabs.com
"In conclusion, the ATI Radeon HD 4890 is exactly what consumers have wanted for
more than a year: ultra-high performance graphics that costs less than the competition.
AMD did it to Intel back when they launched the Athlon processor, seriously beating
the Pentium 4 in both performance and price. Now AMD/ATI returns to put NVIDIA back
in line, and offers the HD4890 to compete against the GTX 285... but at a much lower
price. Benchmark Reviews has completed testing on the HD4890, and on paper it looks
to perform exactly like a heavily-overclocked 4870 might, but there's a lot more
value in this product than first meets the eye."
- Olin Coles –
Benchmarkreviews.com
"When it comes to the Radeon HD 4890 it is hands down the fastest single-GPU graphics
card that AMD has ever produced"
"It performs significantly better than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and runs cooler and
uses less power at idle. There really is not much bad to say about the card as it
is also priced lower than the GeForce GTX 275. Add in the fact that it has already
proven itself to be an overclocking monster with a core clock frequency of nearly
1GHz with the stock cooler and no voltage adjustments you have a clear winner for
all the Radeon fans out there."
- Nate Kirsch –
Legit Reviews
"On the eve of the GeForce GTX 280 launch just last week, ATI unveiled a bombshell—a
brand-new GPU architecture that utilized better process technology and a more power
efficient design to outperform NVIDIA’s gargantuan new GPU."
- Maximum PC, Will Smith
"AMD’s new Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD™ 4850 offer a gigantic performance
improvement over their last generation of GPUs and offer great values when compared
to NVIDIA new GTX 280 and GTX 260. These performance improvements translate into
real-world gaming benefits being able to play at higher resolutions with higher
in-game settings utilizing AA and AF."
- FiringSquad, Brandon Bell
"AMD should be commended on launching a pair of graphics cards that represent excellent
values at their respective price points."
- Hot Hardware, Marco Chiappetta
"As a result of the Radeon HD 4850’s tremendous price/performance ratio, NVIDIA
was forced to slash prices on their entire family of GeForce 8/9 graphics cards.
The GeForce 9800 GTX went from being a $300 card on Thursday, to selling for $199.99
on Friday! NVIDIA also cooked up a brand new GeForce 9800 GTX+ SKU to take on the
new Radeons that will arrive in July."
- FiringSquad, Brandon Bell
"The RV770 GPU looks to be an unequivocal success on almost every front. In its
most affordable form, the Radeon HD 4850 delivers higher performance overall than
the GeForce 9800 GTX and redefines GPU value at the ever-popular $199 price point.
Meanwhile, the RV770's most potent form is even more impressive, in my view. Onboard
the Radeon HD 4870, this GPU sets a new standard for architectural efficiency."
- Tech Report, Scott Wasson
"The Radeon HD 4870's feature set is also very good, its cooler is relatively quiet,
and performance is top notch. And dare we say a $300 graphics card represents an
excellent value, from a price point perspective? These cards are definitely going
to put significant price pressure on NVIDIA's GTX 200 series."
- Hot Hardware, Marco Chiappetta
"ATI’s engineers were given very specific transistor and die size budgets to shoot
for, while at the same time they were still tasked to achieve certain levels of
performance: at least double the performance of R600 was the goal. But did they
accomplish this goal? If you saw the Radeon HD™ 4850 benchmarks last week,
you already know the answer is a resounding YES!"
- FiringSquad, Brandon Bell
"With twin goals of decreased power consumption and more efficiency per die area,
ATI looks poised to dethrone NVIDIA, and all without building a video card that
sports an aural footprint roughly equivalent to a Dyson vacuum cleaner."
- Maximum PC, Will Smith
"AMD's launch of the new Radeon HD 4800 series of graphics card is a success - we
were impressed by the performance of these cards as well as the performance per
watt they were able to produce."
- PC Perspective, Ryan Shrout
"AMD is now offering the best value in video cards with its 4800 series GPU. And
we also see AMD’s drivers maturing more for the 4800 series than we do for the new
200 series from NVIDIA so it is our guess that AMD’s performance will get even better
with its new GPUs comparatively."
- FiringSquad, Brandon Bell