ATI today issued a hotfix for all owners of the new Radeon HD 4800 series cards. This patch applies to both Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 and improves overall performance and stability. Also note that this hotfix includes the Display Driver and Catalyst Control Center.

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The head of ATI Technologies claims that the recently introduced NVIDIA GeForce GTX 200 GPU will be the last monolithic "megachip" because they are simply too expensive to manufacture. The statement was made after NVIDIA executives vowed to keep producing large single chip GPUs. The size of the G200 GPU is about 600mm2¬¬ which means only about 97 can fit on a 300mm wafer costing thousands of dollars. Earlier this year NVIDIA's chief scientist said that AMD is unable to develop a large monolithic graphics processor due to lack of resources. However, Mr. Bergman said that smaller chips allow easier adoption of them for mobile computers.

AMD today announced the new ATI Radeon HD 3870 for Mac & PC Edition, delivering the power to go beyond high-definition visual computing for work and play. Optimized exclusively for Apple Mac Pro systems, the ATI Radeon HD 3870 Mac & PC edition can help drive productivity with built-in 256-bit 512MB GDDR4 frame buffer memory and 320 stream processors to deliver maximum performance for graphics-intensive applications such as 3D modeling, animation and games. Users also can expand visual workspace using twin dual-link DVI ports to connect two 30" Apple Cinema HD displays.

I'm afraid I have some bad news for you. Tom's Hardware has learned that ATI is going to delay the launch of its ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3 cards a bit to June 23th. Originally the cards were slated to come on June 18th. The GDDR5 equipped ATI Radeon HD 4870 cards will now launch at the same time as the 4850 512MB GDDR3, but it is unclear whether there'll be enough GDDR5 chips to ship the 4870 in volume right after its official launch. The report also claims that although the cards are delayed, add-in-board companies have them available right now. NVIDIA plans to launch the GeForce GTX 200 series on June 17th. In case there are no more "unexpected" delays, NVIDIA will be first this year to show its GeForce GTX 280 and GeForce GTX 260 cards, a week later AMD should follow with ATI Radeon HD 4870 GDDR5 and Radeon HD 4850 GDDR3.

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 cards are reportedly already shipping to OEM partners and retailers. According to TG Daily everything is going as planned and AMD/ATI is aiming for a sizable launch of the new product generation, with Radeon 4850 512MB boards leading the charge. The final prices for all Radeon HD 4 series cards will be officially declared during the Computex 2008 tradeshow which will open doors on Monday. Higher-end Radeon 4870 cards with 512MB of onboard GDDR5 memory are expected to ship in volume sometime this summer, with flagship Radeon HD 4870 X2 to follow soon after that.

The Taiwanese website version of Tom's Hardware is hosting a brand new first look at ATI's Radeon HD 4800 series cards. Unfortunately, if you want to read something more than the posted pictures and the "Redefine HD Gaming" marketing charts, you'll need someone or Google to translate from Taiwanese for you, as you might have already guessed. What's interesting are the pictures below, that show the upcoming cards in all their glory. They also confirm our previous story about the cooling solutions that will be used on both cards. The first card pictured is ATI Radeon HD 4870, the second one is Radeon HD 4850.

Various photos of the coolers that will prevent ATI's next gen Radeon HD 4800 series cards from overheating have recently emerged over the Internet. Below are the picture of ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 4850 respectively.

The guys over at VR-Zone have learned some new information about the ATI RV770 chips, and apparently they want to share it with everyone:

AMD has just confirmed the marketing name for RV770 yesterday which is no surprise to anyone, the Radeon HD 4800 series. RV770PRO is Radeon HD 4850, RV770XT is Radeon HD 4870 and R700 is Radeon HD 4870 X2. AMD will be shipping RV770 GPUs to AIB by end of this month and you can expect different card designs from the manufacturers at launch. AMD is set to launch the Radeon HD 4850 on June 18th and it is definitely a hard one with retail availability on the same day. Radeon HD 4870, however, will be launched a week later on June 25th with retail availability in July due to GDDR5 availability. Radeon HD 4870 X2 will come later in Q3. As for the clocks, we won't be revealing them yet but the RV770XT core clock is not going anywhere above 800MHz.

In relation to the new 3DMark Vantage benchmark, all ATI owners that experience some problems with the benchmark, or just want to try some new drivers for their cards can now try 3DMark Vantage Catalyst hotfix driver for Windows Vista 32/64-bit. The 3DMark Vantage Catalyst hotfix (737-33840) includes bug fixes and performance enhancements for all Radeon HD 2400/2600/2900/3400/3600/3850 and 3870 cards. If you experience problems downloading the hotfix please be patient, all servers are currently overloaded.

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Thanks to TG Daily we can now talk about the very soon to be released ATI HD 4800 series of graphics cards with more details. One week ahead of its presumable release date, general specifications of the new cards have been revealed. All Radeon 4800 graphics will use the 55nm TSMC produced RV770 GPU, that include over 800 million transistors, 480 stream processors or shader units (96+384), 32 texture units, 16 ROPs, a 256-bit memory controller (512-bit for the Radeon 4870 X2) and native GDDR3/4/5 support as reported before. At first, AMD's graphics division will launch three new cards - Radeon HD 4850, 4870 and 4870 X2:

• ATI Radeon HD 4850 - 650MHz/850MHz/1140MHz core/shader/memory clock speeds, 20.8 GTexel/s (32 TMU x 0.65 GHz) fill-rate, available in 256MB/512MB of GDDR3 memory or 512MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1.73GHz
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 - 850MHz/1050MHz/1940MHz core/shader/memory clock speeds, 27.2 GTexel/s (32 TMU x 0.85 GHz) fill-rate, available in 1GB GDDR5 version only
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - unknown core/shader clock speeds, available with 2048MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1730MHz

The 4850 256MB GDDR3 version will arrive as the successor of the 3850 256MB with a price in the sub-$200 range. The 4850 512MB GDDR3 should retail for $229, while the 4850 512MB GDDR5 will set you back about $249-269. The 1GB GDDR5 powered 4870 will retail between $329-349. The flagship Radeon HD 4870 X2 will ship later this year for $499.

ATI is moving ahead the launch of its next-generation video processors, as reported by TG Daily. Despite its previous faliures in the graphics business and $8 million loss in the first quarter of this year - AMD's president and chief operating officer Dirk Meyer stated that the company will roll out a significant number of products in May ahead of schedule, including the new RV770 and mobile (M88) graphics parts. RV770 will launch as Radeon HD 4800 and will make its way into the FireStream stream processor and FireGL workstation cards. Both GDDR3 and GDDR5 memories ranging from 256MB to 1024MB will be supported by the chip, but ATI itself will only be offering GDDR5 cards with 256-bit memory controller. The Radeon HD 4850 version is set to come to market with an 800+ MHz core (the final clock has not been specified yet and will not be available until the final qualification is completed), while the 4870 will be the first mass-production GPU with a clock speed higher than 1GHz. The graphics processor itself will integrate more texture memory units (TMUs) - 32 in RV770 against 16 in R6xx. Expect mass availability of RV770 cards soon after their announcement in May.

ATI has released a hotfix that addresses the following issues when Catalyst 7.9 or higher version is installed on AGP cards:

• After installing Catalyst 7.9 or higher an error is received launching DirectX based games. The error indicates that Direct3D Failed to Initialize or similar.
• In Vista your Experience score will drop to 1.0.
• The DirectX Diagnostic tests will fail in both XP and Vista.

Download the fix from here.

Download links of ATI's latest Catalyst 8.4 drivers are now online. To download the full release notes for Catalyst 8.4 click here.

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Until now, the only graphics cards supported by the Folding@home GPU client were ATI's Radeon 16xx, 18xx and 19xx series cards. However, a new beta version is now available from here which will allow owners of HD 2xxx and 3xxx cards to contribute some of their graphics processing power to the project. The Folding@home project is run by Stanford University and simulates protein folding in the hope of finding cures for diseases including Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease and many Cancers. Even if you do not own a supported graphics card, you can still download the standard CPU client and contribute your idle processing power - all you need is an internet connection. To find out more, why not take a look at techPowerUp!'s Folding@home team?

Overclockers Kinc and Elmor from NordicHardware, have managed to break the 3DMark06 world record this weekend using two of ATI's latest dual GPU video cards. With Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (C1 stepping) @ 5.719GHz (439.9x13), ASUS P5E64 WS Pro motherboard, 2x ASUS EAH3870X2 TOP overclocked to 990MHz/1125MHz core/memory and Windows Vista OS they were able to reach 32,601 3DMark. The cooling used for the CPU was liquid nitrogen (LN2) while both graphics cards were air cooled.

Owners of ATI's Radeon HD2xxx/HD3xxx series cards who are experiencing intermittent stuttering when running various 3D applications can now make use of the new Catalyst hotfix which is said to fix the problem. Available now for Windows XP (32/64-bit) and Windows Vista (32/64-bit), the 737-33033 hotfix can be downloaded here.

Admittedly HIS isn't the first company to launch an AGP HD 3850 (SAPPHIRE, PowerColor and GECUBE already have, possibly others), but it is refreshing for any users still running an AGP platform to see new cards being released. HIS has introduced two versions of its AGP HD 3850 - a standard version running at reference speeds and an IceQ 3 Turbo version overclocked from 668MHz to 720MHz core frequency and 1656MHz to 1820MHz memory. Both feature 512MB GDDR3 memory and use the AGP 8X interface. The cards come equipped with all the standard HD 3850 features that you would expect, such as DirectX 10.1 support and AVIVO, although pricing is not listed on HIS' website. It's slightly surprising to see AGP models still being released, as you would have thought most people that are likely to upgrade to a card like this would already have a PCI-Express motherboard, but HIS obviously thinks there is still a market for these cards.

AMD today announced it is improving the visual experience for financial traders while simultaneously helping to reduce power consumption needs for some of the world's largest financial institutions. The new ATI FireMV 2260 2D workstation and desktop accelerator card enhances "trader density" in financial institutions, where IT managers seek to maximize productivity in every bit of workspace, overcrowded with people and hardware, while improving power consumption and cooling needs.

TUL Corporation - a leading manufacturer of AMD Multimedia cards today has announced the new ATI TV Wonder 600 Hybrid PCI Express and TV Wonder 650 Hybrid PCI enabling the ultimate digital TV experience for European PC owners. Available through TUL(PowerColor brand) across Europe , ATI TV Wonder provides customers with an exceptional digital video recorder for their PC. The TV Wonder family of products is AMD LIVE! Ready and Certified for Microsoft Windows Vista - delivering The Ultimate Visual Experience and strengthening the value of multimedia PCs.

The long awaited ATI Catalyst 8.3 is finally here! This driver package brings lots of new features, some of them being CrossFireX support, added Hybrid graphics support and full DirectX 10.1 compatibility.


ATI Catalyst 8.3 Release Notes Highlights
ATI Catalyst 8.3 for Windows XP/Vista 32/64-bit

AMD has released a YouTube marketing video for their upcoming 780 chipset. The 780 chipset is the first of its kind to utilize ATI Hybrid Graphics technology. This technology enables the user to combine the performance of both the integrated graphics chip and a standalone discrete graphics card for an affordable Crossfire-like solution.

All ATI card owners may prepare for another new Catalyst very soon. The release notes for ATI Catalyst 8.2 package are already posted online here (download in pdf format), meaning that the new driver download links are to be posted too in a few hours. I'll update the story with active links as soon as they're up and running. Until then prepare yourself for the new Catalyst 8.2.

Performance improvements with this release of Catalyst includes Company of Heroes DX10 frame rates increasing as much as 20% across all of the ATI Radeon HD 2x00 series of products and on all ATI Radeon HD 3x00 series of products. These performance improvements are even larger (up to 30%) for CrossFire configurations.

EDIT: ATI Catalyst 8.2 Display Driver Download

With the launch of the GeForce 9 series getting closer and closer, AMD is hard pressed to find something to keep themselves competitive. While the RV670 and R680 are regaining some much needed market share, they will both pale when the GeForce 9 series is released to the public. Thankfully, AMD is not going down without a fight. About the same time as the GeForce 9 series is released, AMD is releasing a little something called the RV770. At this point, it appears that the RV770 is about 50% faster than the current HD3870, which is certainly respectable. How this compares to the GeForce 9 series is still a mystery. The release of CrossFire X technology ought to really help benchmark numbers, assuming AMD can make buying four AMD GPUs cost about as much as two from NVIDIA.

The current drivers available from ATI (Catalyst 8.1) support an interesting new mode: interoperability between an HD3870 and an HD3850 in CrossFire mode. Fudzilla had both the time and resources to test this out, so they did. Before the test results are considered, please remember that these are just initial drivers. Both Catalyst 8.2 and 8.3 will offer more impressive CrossFire results. To make a long story short, and to sum up a lot of bar charts, AMD is well on their way to making Hybrid CrossFire a feasible solution for a lot of people, especially once more graphics cards can be mixed-and-matched. Please check out Fudzilla for all the benchmarks.

The most notable increase was 50% in Half Life 2. NVIDIA does not have anything comparable to Hybrid CrossFire.

All Radeon HD 3870 X2 owners may be curious to know about this sample ATI Catalyst 8-451-2-080123a driver specially for their X2 cards. The 103MB package includes both Windows XP and Windows Vista drivers. Build date is 08-01-23. Use at your own risk, those drivers are not WHQL certified.

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