Ridiculously high expectations are an occupational hazard in the computer chip industry. So, it's not often that a new product exceeds them. Norton antivirus for mac subscription key. We put the 1.3 GHz Pro 580 to the test against the 503 MHz 4850 Mac to find out which you should buy, the older AMD or the ATi. But by doing just that AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 4800 series of graphics cards, officially launched today, marks itself out as something seriously special. That's right, folks, the Radeon HD 4800 GPU, previously codenamed RV770, is unequivocally, undeniably, unmistakably excellent. In fact, it might just be the most efficient, effective and elegant graphics chip that the world has ever seen. It certainly delivers a bigger bang for your buck than any graphics chip before. And yet it is not quite the fastest. Cheap chip, but no chump To understand why RV770 is so good – and, incidentally, why it doesn't matter that it fails to pinch the outright performance crown back from arch rival NVIDIA – let's take a quick tour of the key specifications. The big news is a boost in the number of shader cores compared with the existing Radeon HD 3800 series. Astonishingly, AMD has managed to nearly triple the shader count from 320 units to 800. The 4800's texture-processing capabilities have also ballooned from 16 to 40 units. Factor in core clockspeeds that are approximately on a par with the 3800 Series and the result is monumental boost in raw processing power. But don't get the idea that AMD has merely blown a massive transistor budget to simply cut 'n' paste more functionals units into the GPU core. This new pixel pounder may offer much the same DirectX 10.1 3D feature set as ye olde Radeon HD 3800. It's even based on precisely the same 55nm silicon production technology. But what AMD has done is so much more sophisticated than create an oversized 3800 core. Compact and cost effective Every aspect of the chip has been overhauled and redesigned with an eye to both efficiency and performance. The result, is an extremely compact and cost-effective graphics chip. To appreciate just how compact it is, try this for size. Despite the 150 per cent increase in shader and texture units, the 4800 Series has just 44% more transistors. It's also rather revealing to compare the 4800's raw computer power with that of NVIDIA's new mega-GPU, the GeForce GTX 280. The fastest of the new Radeon HD 4800 boards, the 4870 (see below for full specifications), is capable of a colossal 1.2TFlops of raw compute power courtesy of 956 million transistors. Now, that might sound like a lot of transistors. But the GeForce GTX 280 requires no less than 1.4 billion transistors in return for 0.933TFlops of processing power. So, not only is the 4800 smaller and cheaper to make. ![]() It's also more power efficient. AMD reckons the maximum power consumption of the 4800 Series is 160 watts while the GTX 280 sucks up an enormous 236 watts. GDDR5 arrives Further highlights of the 4800 series include the introduction of a new graphics memory type for the 4870 model. With a data rate of 3.6GHz, the new GDDR5 chips are not far off twice as fast as the best previous graphics memory. That's handy because the one area where the 4800 looks a little deficient is the width of its memory bus. At just 256 bits, it is half the width of the beastly GeForce GTX 280.
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