Preliminary RV770 performance, clocks revealed
Written by Andreas G 19 May 2008 15:00

The man we all know as CJ has supplied VR-Zone with some preliminary performance figures for the upcoming Radeon HD 4850 and 4870. Although vague, we see no reason to doubt them as they are pretty much on the mark with what the talk behind the curtain is saying. First of all, Radeon HD 4870 is going to land somewhere between value and high-end of the next generation, the performance is estimated to be 25% higher than 9800GTX. At the same time, Radeon HD 4850 is suppose to whip GeForce 8800GT by the same margin.

The prices of the cards will be very competitive, and thanks to the yields of the A12 core revision, AMD can pump out chips at a high rate. We're not entirely sure about the pricing since we're getting two very different prices from different sources, but it should land somewhere around $250 for the Radeon HD 4870, and $200 for the Radeon HD 4850. Considering the projected performance above, these should prove to be some real killers for AMD. While we don't really expect them to compete with GT200, NVIDIA's counter will cost at least double, close to triple that.

We said we wouldn't reveal the final core clocks, sources told us not to, and we haven't, but since the core clock of Radeon HD 4850 core clock leaked elsewhere we though we might share the rest too. Radeon HD 4850 will sport a core clock of 625MHz and GDDR3 memory operating at 2GHz. Radeon HD 4870 has a core clock of 725MHz and GDDR5 memory running at 3.92GHz. Both cards have 256-bit bus memory, but thanks to the high frequency of GDDR5, the bandwidth is identical to that of 2GHz GDDR3 over a 512-bit bus.

Last we heard, RV770 has 480 shader processors, not 800, but there are also some stories going around that there might be some substance to the rumors of RV770 having 800 shader processors. Only 480 of them would be for the graphics though, while the remaining 320 is for physics. We can't confirm this so take it with a pinch of salt.

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