This morning was a hot any heavy one, as both AMD and Nvidia announced that their highly anticipated GPUs are now officially on the market. Just to get those palms sweaty and the mouth watering, AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4890 (ATI RV790) packs a whopping 1.36 TeraFLOPS, GDDR5 memory using a 256-bit interface, 800 stream processors, and GPU clock speeds almost breaking the 1 GHz mark. Although AMD had gamers in mind when designing this new addition to the HD 4000 series, entertainment enthusiasts will enjoy equal performance via AMD's UVD 2.0 and HDMI support. The card even offers DVD upscaling and dynamic contrast.
“The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card represents the AMD sweet spot strategy reloaded,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “With last year’s launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 products, we gave gamers great performance and an incredible value proposition. Today, we’re doing it again. ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics cards are incredible performers, priced to sell in all major markets worldwide.”
If Nvidia is the preferred flavor, the company released its new GeForce GTX 275 GPU. Based on the GT200 architecture, the GeForce GTX 275 features 240 processor cores operating at 1404 MHz, 80 texture processing units, a 448-bit memory interface, and an 896 MB framebuffer. Nvidia said that the new GPU is ready for Windows 7, and comes packed with the new GeForce Release 185 drivers. The launch also coincides with the availability of the new GeForce Power Pack #3, a package containing three new PhysX applications, and two new CUDA-accelerated applications. Unfortunately, the GeForce GTX 275 will not be available globally until April 14.
But within the last few days, three GeForce GTX 275 cards have surfaced. Palit claims to be the first in the market to ship the non-reference design GeForce GTX 275. "Palit GTX275 is already distributed to all local channels this week and gaming enthusiast are able to get their first GTX275 from Palit in the PC shops now," the company said. Palit's GTX 275 offering features 240 stream processors with a 633 MHz core clock, 1404 shader clock, and 896 MB of 448-bit, 2268 MHz GDDR3 memory. The card also features a cooling system utilizing two PWM fans and three heat-pipes.
InnoVISION also announced its GeForce GTX 275 card today, however it wasn't quite as bold as Palit. On the surface, the card basically offers the same hardware features: 633 MHz core frequency, a 448-bit memory bus, 240 stream processors and more. While the company provided a nice selection of closeup images--sporting the GPU and circuitry--the company offered no information in regards to cooling; the images display only one fan housed on the right end. What this card does offer in the cool-factor category is the blonde female warrior plastered on the left portion of the card. It's assumed that she has nothing to do with cooling.
Overseas, Twintech launched its plethora of GeForce GTX 275 cards, two of which feature 896 MB of memory and two that offer 1792 MB of memory. As usual, Twintech takes one from each, overclocks them with love (OC Editions), and throws in its AC Accelero XTREME 3 ultra-quiet 92mm PWM fan. These overclocked versions offer a core clock increased to 670 MHz and a memory clock increased to 2320 MHz. All four Twintech cards start with a pricetag of $329 USD. Unfortunately, cards don't look as impressive as what InnoVISION offers, with two green eyes staring back at consumers.
Of course, these Nvidia cards from Palit, InnoVISION and Twintech are merely samples of what's to come within the next few weeks. If Nvidia isn't the flavor of the month, then there are AMD vendors such as Club 3D, with its card offering a core clock speed of 850 MHz, a memory clock of 3900 MHz, and 1024 MB of GDDR5 memory using a 256-bit bandwidth. However, ASUS, GIGABYTE, XFX and others have already started appearing online. The ATI Radeon HD 4890 retails for $249 USD, and priced at select etailers as low as $229 after the mail-in rebate.
It will be exciting to see what other partners will offer within the next month. As it stands, both the GeForce GTX 275 and ATI Radeon HD 4890 look extremely tasty, and may be hard to choose between the two. While Newegg isn't currently listing GeForce GTX 275 cards, consumers can hit this link and pull up a great listing of ATI Radeon HD 4890 cards from vendors such as Diamond Multimedia, HIS, XFX, ASUS, Sapphire and more. Hopefully, the overall delay of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 275 won't hurt its competitive sales against AMD.
