Hot on the heels of NVIDIA's GTX 200 family launch, AMD confirmed that it will introduce its own high end 55nm RV770-based Radeon 4850 on June 25, 2008.
The Radeon 4850 will feature a 625 MHz core clock and 2000+ MHZ GDDR3 memory clock . It will also feature 480 stream processors, compared to its predecessor's 320 stream processors.
In addition to all R670's features (Shader Model 4.0, OpenGL 2.0, and DirectX 10.1), R-770 will be the first AMD chip to include "Game Physics processing". No more details have been given regarding this physics processing, but it is reasonable to assume it has something to do with AMD's recent partnership with Havok.
Although Radeon 4850 will utilize GDDR3 memory, AMD's documentation indicate that they plan to introduce a an R-770 based graphics card with GGDR5. Radeon 4870 will launch later this summer, but no clues were given regarding its RAM memory type.
Radeon 4850 will retail for as low as $199, giving it a clear price advantage against both the GeForce GTX 200 ($600) - which AMD partners claim to the closest competitor - and the GeForce 9800 GTX ($299) which AMD pits as Radeon 4850's rival. More expensive versions of RV770 launch later with HDMI, audio pass-through and (possibly) GDDR5 memory.
The new Radeon 4850 will require a 450 Watt power supply for single card support and 550 Watt power for CrossFire mode.
