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By Jing Garcia, Tech Times editor
Bangkok: In terms of today’s market share in
the graphics card arena, ATI is taking a beating from Nvidia.
ATI’s archrival in the video card market took advantage of the
lull that quickly ensued when chip manufacturer, AMD, acquired
ATI’s business in a whopping $5.4-billion deal in 2006. But now,
ATI top honchos say that’s about to change.
In a regional media conference here at the Grand
Sheraton on June 24, AMD executives from the ATI graphics group
exhibited the performance of a new line of graphics card under the
ATI Radeon 4800 series.
“We accept the fact that Nvidia is dominating
the market, we can’t do anything about,” said Paul Ayscough,
director for advanced marketing, AMD Graphics Group. “But what we
can do right now is offer the market a better option.”
And a better option indeed, as the new ATI
Radeon HD 4800 Series is portrayed by the graphics card company as a
turning point in GPU design. What used to be the traditional way of
selling video cards with power and cost ranging too high for the
average consumers, particularly gamers, AMD’s new GPU strategy
would provide the advantage of optimal solution for performance and
ultra-enthusiasts gamers by building the perfect gaming solution
within the $200 to $300 range.
“AMD is taking a different philosophy in
graphics cards development” said Ayscough. “It is much more
elegant and efficient to create a really good CPU at the sweet
spot.”
The new 4800s, with the 4850 board codenamed “Makedon,”
which was actually named after Terry Makedon, group manager for
software at AMD, will support Direct X 10.1, plus features that
include: TeraScale Graphics Engine, which features over one
teraFLOPS, nearly one billion transistors and 800 stream processors
for high resolutions and fast frame rates previously only available
with dual-card systems; Advanced DDR5 Memory, which provides twice
the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3; Enhanced Anti-Aliasing &
Anisotropic Filtering for ultra smooth jagged edges, creating
true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features,
and ATI CrossFireX Technology, providing up to quad GPU support for
superior scalability to any system.
The 4800s will also feature PCI Express 2.0,
Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) to free up CPU load, Accelerated
Video Transcoding (AVT), Enhanced DVD Upscaling, HDMI with 7.1
digital surround sound support, Dynamic Power Management and More
Performance Per Watt, delivering up to 2x the performance per watt
of AMD’s previous generation GPUs.
The demo presented to media obviously exhibited
the advantages of what the new ATI Radeons could do, particularly
with the latest features and technologies integrated with the new
cards. With this, AMD executives are confident that with new
technology and a focused marketing strategy, the company would be
able regain the lost market that ATI used to hold.
“The playing field is now different” said
Ayscough. “We’re bringing high-performance at an affordable
price.”
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