It seems that ATI is releasing their 6 month refresh this May in the form of the Radeon HD4850 and HD4870. Some sites already have specs and all for them.

http://www.hardware-infos.com/news.php?news=2008

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ati-radeon-4800,5223.html

The HD4870 sports 480 stream processors, 32 Texture Units (sucks) and 1024MB of GDDR5 3.8 Ghz memory (yay) on a 256 bit bus width (bleh). Their texel fillrate performance is... well, comparable to the likes of the 9600GT, but again, this are not supposed to compete with the higher end GeForce 9s. The HD3870 is supposed to retail for $350USD.

EDIT: I forgot, these are based on the RV770 core. Plus the shader clock is now unlocked from the core clock.

Discuss

This might be the 9600GS but the 9600GS will be cheaper.

Also the 9900GTx wont be touched by AMD for while.

Also why does any game need that pointless amount of processors... DX11 isnt going to be out for a few years.

Is this suppose to their top end cards? It's still out of the price range of many so anyone with that much amount of cash with go even further and buy Nvidia's high end.

All of the specs are made up, basically. Wait until summer or so for the real cards.

It's RV770 because two on one chip is the flagship R700.

It's interesting because my motherboard is Crossfire compatible, but I have an Nvidia gpu and I don't even know if my power supply could handle Crossfire (500w and also, newegg said it wasn't crossfire compatible, so I'd guess no).

So long as I don't need Vista until the next Windows is out, I'm good!

That card will run well, quite a solid purchase and the X2 version should be smokin hot.

I bet the 4870 X2 (probably a July release) will beat the 9900GTX.

ditto mr Slime.

I'm starting to wonder what the point is anymore. We need decent cards that use low wattage and can still play games. These high end cards aren't that interesting. The PC is mostly dead as a gaming platform due to the complexities of the system and the pirating that goes on. Why not release cards that will actually matter in the market? Like a decent low wattage vid card that can play all the games on Steam.

It seems at some point the governments are going to regulate power draw on electronics and if these card makers keep going for the high end and ignore the low wattage end, their asking for trouble!

To me it seems like we're seeing the same problems that the muscle cars in the 70's faced. They don't quite understand their market and they really don't see the big target on their heads.