Less than a day after releasing the ATI Catalyst 10.9 WHQL driver suite, AMD rolled out the Catalyst 10.9a Hotfix driver for users of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 4850 X2 graphics accelerators. Applicable for Windows Vista and Windows 7, Catalyst 10.9b Hotfix improves performance of the said graphics cards, eliminating a bug that lets the OS make use of only one of the two GPUs.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 10.9a Hotfix

AMD is attempting to revive its competitiveness that took a beating with NVIDIA's introduction of 55 nm G200b-based graphics accelerators. The method AMD seems to be adopting is by giving its existing flagship GPU, the RV770, a series of design improvements that facilitate higher clock-speeds, in turn, better performance on offer.

A lot has been said about RV790 till date, with each commentator coming up with a new version of the story. It has been more or less established that the RV790 will be a improvement over the RV770, though not a revolutionary one. Fresh information gathered by PC Games Hardware places a realistic estimate on up to where RV790 is going to push the performance envelope for AMD.

After RV740, the next AMD venture on the 40nm silicon process will be the company's next flagship GPU: the RV790. With this core AMD hopes to reclaim the performance and value crowns, more importantly, energy efficiency the newer fab process hopes to bring to the current-generation GPU.

Quite obviously, AMD will assign new SKUs to the products based on the RV790. The safest guess would be the formation of a new sub-series under Radeon 4000, the Radeon HD 4900 series. German website ATi Forum has learned that indeed AMD planning on a new sub-series based on the new GPU, following scoops on RV740 making the Radeon HD 4700 series. Once again, AMD might create two products based on a single GPU and one flagship dual-GPU accelerator, to begin with. The company's lackluster optimism in the R700 Pro (Radeon HD 4850 X2), has shown on the upcoming series with no mention of a second-inline dual GPU accelerator. In ATi Forum's theory, the RV790XT gets HD 4970, RV790Pro gets HD 4950 and the dual-GPU flagship SKU could be named Radeon HD 4995 X2. Talk about competitive naming.

Although the Radeon HD 4850 X2 is an official SKU by AMD, launched (rather paper-launched) by the company along with the HD 4870 X2, Sapphire ended up being the only company to come up with an HD 4850 X2 series product line, since AMD didn't specify a reference design of its own. Sapphire went on to launch 1GB (2x 512MB) and 2GB (2x 1GB) variants of the said accelerator.

In AMD's latest release of the Catalyst driver suite (version 9.1), the HD 4850 X2 was excluded from the supported hardware list. Instead the company now released a special release of Catalyst 9.1 for the Radeon HD 4850 X2 series. The driver provides the same feature-set and list of fixes as described in the original release notes document for Catalyst 9.1, albeit being specific for the said accelerator. The WHQL-signed drivers are available for Windows Vista and Windows XP operating systems from the AMD website here.

AMD started its marketing offensive against NVIDIA's new dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295, and single-GPU GeForce GTX 285 accelerators, in an attempt to put the Radeon HD 4800 X2 series accelerators ahead of its competition in terms of performance on a "broad scale", and used the cards' availability in non-reference designs as a USP against NVIDIA's offerings using a uniform company-specified design. All this, in an internal presentation leaked to Donanim Haber. As for those wondering why, ATI and NVIDIA have a history of picking on each others' flagship products by means of such presentations, with which they intend to influence OEMs and channel vendors, though it always happens so, that these presentations reach public domains. Viral marketing or something plausible? Find out for yourself:

Sapphire has really stepped up on its engineering lately, designing the industry's first graphics card based on two RV770 Pro (Radeon HD 4850) cores. While the card that has been making news for a while now, has 2GB of GDDR3 memory, with each GPU having access to 1GB of it, Sapphire has decided to carve yet another SKU, the Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB, where each GPU has access to 512 MB of it.

The card is expected to fit comfortably between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the Sapphire HD 4850 2GB in the markets, while offering performance levels that justify its price. The two RV770 GPUs are clocked at 625 MHz, with memory clocked at 1,986 MHz. There is no word on its availability or pricing yet.

After last week's brief introduction of the first dual RV770 Radeon HD4850 spotted in the wild, we've now managed to find some benchmark scores for you thanks to the guys over at VR-Zone. Apparently they have the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 card in their lab and have decided to pair it with an Core i7/X58 platform to deliver the maximum out of it. This card is clocked at 625MHz for the core, 1000MHz for the 1GB GDDR3 memory and has 1600 stream processors (800 for each of the two RV770 GPUs). More pictures of the card and results from different widescreen resolutions can be seen here.

ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 graphics card, which was formally announced way back in August and is still unavailable, was spotted today over at pchacc.cn leading us to believe that it will finally hit the market for real. The card below is build by ATI's major partner Sapphire and features custom dual-slot cooling system, 2GB of GDDR3 memory, a 256-bit memory interface, CrossFireX support and blue PCB. Last but not least are the two 55nm RV770 GPUs and the GPU bridge that links them. The card will require an extra 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe connectors. Currently, there's no exact release date, but the little brother of 4870 X2 is expected to become available later next month.

The battle for supremacy in the current generation of consumer graphics hasn't calmed down as yet. Just as reports came in of NVIDIA giving the GeForce GTX 260 a boost with its shader compute power by enabling 24 shader units, taking on the Radeon HD 4870, GeForce GTX 280 seems to be enjoying its $420~$440 price-tag. For sure it isn't the fastest graphics accelerator but its compelling price tag is what is drawing buyers away from the HD 4870 X2.

AMD had already announced in its press release for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 launch that it would release a HD 4850 X2 at a roughly $400 price range. That moment seems to be coming closer, when ATI has a graphics card for $399, that outperforms the GeForce GTX 280. Three slides from the company have surfaced. The first one lists out its vital specifications, including its maximum power draw, rated at 230W. The memory bandwidth of this card is 128 GB/s, and it ends up with 2 GB of GDDR3 memory.