AMD claims world’s most powerful GPU with the ATI Radeon HD 4890

To meet the ever increasing graphical demands of modern games AMD has introduced the ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card that boasts a staggering 1.36 TeraFLOPs of compute power, GDDR5 memory, and engine clock speeds capable of nearly 1GHz.

The HD 4890 supports DirectX 10.1 for the latest game titles such as Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., Electronic Art’s BattleForge and SEGA’s Stormrise, as well as GSC Gameworld’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Clear Sky to deliver improved game and visual performance. The card is also designed to offer tuning potential for overclocking enthusiasts and those looking to get even more performance out of their gaming rigs can combine as many as four ATI Radeon HD 4890 cards in one PC utilizing ATI CrossFireX technology with an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard.

Gamers aren’t the only ones to benefit from the increased power of the HD 4890 with ATI claiming the card can can also help accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video into multiple formats thanks to ATI Stream technology when using ATI Stream-enabled applications such as CyberLink’s video editing software, PowerDirector 7, which provides GPU accelerated video conversion to deliver improved performance and functionality when compared to CPU-only acceleration. The card is also designed to offer improved HD multimedia performance through AMD’s second generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.0) to provide smooth HD video playback with support for HDMI, picture-in-picture and the latest HD audio technologies such as 7.1 surround sound.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies including ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GECUBE, GIGABYTE, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), Jetway, MSI, Palit Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology, VisionTek and XFX, offering a variety of custom board and cooling solutions.

The ATI Radeon HD 4890 is available now for USD$249 MSRP, and priced at select etailers as low as USD$229 after mail-in rebate.

Darren Quick