Computex 2008: RV770 in the flesh

Posted by Thomas Gribble in June 5th, 2008

Amidst the waves that NVIDIA has been making so far at Computex 2008, AMD has had a strong showing by introducing, among other things, their new video cards. The Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 4850 both have faces now, and they look familiar since AMD did not really deviate from the red on red design. The 4870 will have a dual-slot cooler design, which is normal considering it is the enthusiast level card. The 4850 has a slim single-slot cooler, which appears nearly identical to the the 3850’s cooler.

Fudzilla has reported that the smaller card actually runs pretty hot to the touch, which is a given in today’s graphics hardware market. We actually have an insider’s report about the heat production of the card, but if we told you about it we’d have no guarantee of being alive tomorrow morning. AMD showed a tech demo of the 4800 series which consisted of a couple of rendered scenes being played back. Fudzilla, which was on hand for the event, observed what they call truly-realistic graphics for the first time.

For those of you waiting for the successor to AMD’s dual-chip HD3870X2, there is some good news. Apparently R700 will follow the launch of the RV770 cards by just 6 weeks. Since RV770 launch is slated for late June, we expect the R700 sometime in early to mid-August. AMD says the reason for the delay is that they want to develop their dual-chip driver as much as they can before launch. We were the first and only ones to report about the R680 (HD3870X2) driver development back in March. There is no official word yet regarding the final name of the new card, though we strongly suspect it will be the HD4870X2.

We all know that tech demos are there to impress the media and attendees primarily, but this does at least show off the potential capabilities of the card, even if this potential is never realized in an actual game.

Also, there are reports that the next Catalyst driver version will have some optimizations for those frustrated with their relatively low 3DMark Vantage scores. Catalyst 8.6 should be available pretty soon.

Lastly, we have some extra details regarding the HD4850: It will be superior to NVIDIA’s GeForce 8800GT (and probably the 9800GT since that product is a rebrand) and will be priced somewhere in the $230 area.

Source: Fudzilla

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