AMD ATI Radeon HD 4850 Crossfire

But enough of the features, Let's have a look at the differences between the two actual products being announced today.

The Radeon HD 4850 itself

The first product released will be the cheapest one. Both the 4850 and 4870 products have the same chip, make no mistake. What you'll notice is that the 4850 will run at a 625 clock frequency and comes with 512MB GDDR3 memory (framebuffer) clocked at 1986 MHz. These two factors are pretty much the biggest difference compared to the big brother, which we'll get into in a second. Obviously the Radeon HD 4850 is again Crossfire/CrossfireX compatible, meaning if your mainboard allows it you can get four of these cards working. Power requirements aren't bad either. You can expect a 110 Watt peak watt power consumption. As mentioned earlier, good news also for the High-definition freaks, the new UVD 2.0 engine is built in as well, meaning we can now do dual-stream decoding and also push 7.1 channels lossless sound through HDMI. Fully dual-link DVI and HDCP compatible, of course. Again we'll talk about it later.

At a 199 USD introduction price, this product is just going to rock, but don't take my word for that, judge for yourself once we show you the benchmark results. Last thing I need to mention, all these features did not make this a huge bulky product, in fact it's a nice single-slot design. So yes, this is going to be an interesting product for sure.

Target price: 199 USD

ATI CrossfireX
With selected mainboards (pretty much anything not NVIDIA) you can combine one, two, three or even four graphics cards together in Crossfire mode. That's a lot of future redundancy. Today in this article we'll bring you some Crossfire results as we'll put the two Radeon HD 4850 we review together and have them crunch and show you some numbers.

DirectX 10.1
Both the Radeon HD 4850 & 4870 have support for the DirectX 10.1 API, introducing a new layer of extensions. DirectX 10.1 was launched with the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and is backwards compatible with the existing DirectX 10 layer. Make no mistake, DX10.1 fully supports DX10 hardware. And DX10.0 class cards will still play DX10.1 games just fine.

It's basically an update to DX10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly. All the hardware is still supported, all the games still run, all the features are still there, it's just simply extended the feature set and the lifetime of the API. The release mainly sets a few more image quality standards for graphics vendors, while giving developers more control over image quality. Features scheduled for DirectX 10.1 include:

• Mandatory 32-bit floating point filtering
• Mandatory 4x anti-aliasing
• Shader model 4.1

As stated today we'll review not one, but two Radeon HD 4850 graphics cards. One from a new company called Force3D and the second one from Powercolor.

For DX 10.1 gaming you'll likely need two cards ...