We must admit that in recent times we’ve unfairly neglected gamers with limited budget that don’t have many possibilities to set a certain sum aside for purchasing some graphics card from higher price range. Let’s face it, nor ATi nor nVIDIA were much better. From launching of GeForce 8600GTS and 8600GT and their price drop, nVIDIA did very little for this category of users. As “greens” are for some time occupied only with renaming of their products even these new low-cost graphics cards didn’t bring anything new, except for model GeForce 9600GT.

Launch of nVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 280 brought a huge enthusiasm in last two months, but it already begun to fade. The main “culprit” is ATi which showed to all of us that even when hard times come they are continuing with good work as if competition isn't a problem and as confirmation of their efforts we got incredible new generation of graphics cards. The whole story started with great Radeon HD 4850 and continued with HD 4870 that had GDDR5 memory. After great critics for these two GPUs, ATi was aware that they shouldn’t stop there, if they want to overthrown nVIDIA from the top performance throne. And they did it…

Radeon HD4800 series of graphics cards is real refreshment in these days. Every new generation of GPU brought a big shift in performances and ATi this time showed us that top model graphics chip (RV770) doesn’t have to be expensive. Based on experience from previous HD3850 and HD3870 models, we expected that new model HD4870 will dominate in middle-high class, with lower price and higher performances than other competitors. But, we were wrong… Tests showed something quite unexpected. Still, before benchmark results let’s see what new GPU offers.