Video Cards & GPUs - Page 431

Ontario, Calif., January 5, 2009 - XFX, following its recently announced collaboration with AMD, today introduced its first Radeon™ HD-powered 4000 series cards, the XFX Radeon™ HD 4870, 4850, 4830, 4650 and 4350.

All five models feature exceptional memory bandwidth, board power and compute power as well as a number of industry-firsts. For example, the XFX Radeon™ HD 4870 is the first graphics card with GDDR5 memory.

However, there is just one thing that does not hold ground in the story - and that is that RV870 should use 512-bit memory interface and GDDR5 memory. I may be forced to eat my own words, but no, ATI RV870 will not bring 512-bit memory controller. RV870 will feature much improved 256-bit memory controller, and it will offer bandwidth of some 150-200 GB/s per GPU. When you combine the two GPUs, possibly on the same substrate, you will get 512-bit memory controller...in a way. 512-bit memory controller with current GDDR5 memory (900 MHz QDR, e.g. 3.6 "GHz") yields 230 GB/s. And that is the amount of bandwidth GTX280 would have if nV went for GDDR5 instead of older GDDR3 memory.

Nvidia's next-gen part will however, bring 512-bit memory controller coupled with GDDR5 memory, offering insane amount of bandwidth - 200-250 GB/s, to be more precise.