This shouldn’t be a problem because both cards use identical 256-bit Ring Bus for communication with memory and support GDDR3 and GDDR5 memory. This doesn’t imply appearance of 4850 with GDDR5 memory because it can compete with its stronger brother by price and certainly with performances. Beside difference in video memory that was used, cards differ also in GPU clocks, 625MHz for 4850 and 750MHz for 4870. Even we didn’t see 4870, on the end of the presentation ATI showed a very short “live” demo of Crysis and it looked phenomenal. Crysis worked very fast even in high resolution. Representatives from ATI confirmed that card that runs this demo is based on R700 architecture. Our assumption is that we, actually, saw some early engineer specimen in action, because the case was locked and undercovered and there was no chance to see inside. R700 should be found on the market under name of 4870 X2 just because it uses two 4870 GPUs. This card is still wrapped in secrecy and we didn’t come to any reliable information according its architecture. There’s only left to wait launch of this beast (based on multiGPU solutions) in August. This multiGPU vision is future stated by Matt Skynner, vice president of marketing, Graphics Products Group, AMD. Philosophy announced with launch of Spider platform on which you can improve performances simply by adding graphics cards, now gets elaboration: same way of thinking is now applied on graphics cards, using multiGPU configurations. When you have smaller GPUs with efficient consumption and excellent performances, further increases of graphics card performances is accomplished only by adding new GPUs, and not by new versions of faster, heavier and bigger consumption GPUs.

High performances were necessary to break “Sensory Barrier” – to present gamers with such a level of details never seen so far, only in movies.  Don’t get us misunderstood, one 4850 still isn’t strong enough for something like that, but certain number of them can do the job and show something similar to impressive demo that was shown to us. In demo, our old acquaintance Ruby plays with battle robot and all that in very real street surroundings with lots of parked cars and tones of “sugar sweets”.

“We’ll conquer nVIDIA in every segment and in every price range!” shouted Zwika from the stage. According to specifications of presented cards from 48xx series, something like that can easily happen. 38xx series GPU had 320 unified shader units and new generation has 800 unified shader units. “Much more than nVIDIA” says Zwika “which made its top processor in 65nm technology while RV770 GPUs are made in second generation 55nm technology”. ATI can pull out from 2 to 2.5 times more processors from wafer of the same diameter, reducing waste rate and manufacturing costs per unit. For ATI this is already second generation of cards with DirectX 10.1 support that brings so many improvements regarding DirectX 10. These improvements can go up to 25%. That will become very important this autumn when new games series that will support simultaneously DirectX 10 and 10.1 come out.  And for finals Zwika announced price tags: 199$ for 4850 and 299$ for 4870. nVIDIA’s answer on thrown down gauntlet came while this text was written. Price for 9800GTX was 300$ (a pipe dream for all buyers of 8800GT model) and now its price tag is 199$. Will this answer be enough to disturb ATI’s raise on market? We shall see… But one thing is for certain these are situations that end users can only benefit from. It’s even possible that these price reductions can turn out to be short-lived until 9800GTX cards vanish from stocks and make place for ace in a sleeve – 9800GTX+ made in 55nm technology. Leaving the stage, Zwika declared his certainty that nVIDIA GTX2xx series is last of monolithic cards kind and in next iteration they will also decide for multiGPU approach.