So you signed an NDA? If so, why are you talking about it? If not, how do you know?

I doubt anyone has anything conclusive abourt what's two generations away.

I dont know all details so its fine. I cant exactly say what they are enhancing, wtf the cards will even be called etc. I go on what employees hint to me.

AMD has some interesting stuff coming down the pipes including one that is supposed, according to contacts, have more stream processors plus they might be pulling an intel and integrating a GPU into their processors.

A. Thats obvious.

B. Fusions been on their roadmap for a while now.

"As for the new business, the Radeon HD 4870 is not only based on an efficient architecture (both in terms of performance per area and per watt), it is an excellent buy as well. Of course we have to put out the usual disclaimer of "it depends on the benchmark you care about," but in our testing we definitely saw this $300 part perform at the level of NVIDIA's $400 GT200 variant, the GTX 260. This fact clearly sets the 4870 in a performance class beyond its price.

Like it's RV670 based predecessors, the Radeon 4850 and 4870 both implement DX10.1 support and enable GPU computing through their CAL SDK and various high level language constructs that can compile down SPMD code to run on AMD hardware. While these features are great and we encourage developers to embrace them, we aren't going to recommend cards based on features that aren't yet widely used. Did we mention there's a tessellator in there?

For now, the Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 are both solid values and cards we would absolutely recommend to readers looking for hardware at the $200 and $300 price points."

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=12

Its a monster allright. A sexy monster of a card.

Edit: In Xfire - $650 worth if you count the extra cost of the motherboard ($300*2+$50) It runs Crysis at 2560/1600 *4 megapixels!!* at 40 frames per second.

OMG!!!!!

Has anyone tested out the 4850 and 4870 in Crossfire, of is that something ATI hasn't enabled yet? I'd also be interested in how this card performs with hybrid crossfire, aka using a motherboards integrated graphics + a discrete card.

Also. LOL @ someone taking a PR specialists hints about cards a year off as gospel.

Most likely Radeon's poor performance in some areas was because of drivers.
The have already launched hotfix for both of those cards.
http://plaza.fi/muropaketti/amd-julkaisi-hotfix-ajurit-radeon-hd-4800-tuoteperheelle
http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=894

 Yep 2x 4850 > GTX280, 4870*2 >>> GTX280. IIRC the 4870 makes 2560/1600 playable at about 30 frames per second on high.

Hybrid Xfire is a low end solution, better suited to media centre pcs than to try and link a card with 100 times the power with one so slow and expect it to perform better.

Very good, the better competitor gets, the lower prices we get. =)