On Wednesday, AMD launched its ATI Radeon HD 4800 video card series. The 4870, performing at roughly 1.2 teraflops per second, brings twice the speed a Radeon HD 3870 card does.

Out of the new releases, as it is packing a core speed of 750MHz, the 4870 comes in as the fastest card. It is also the first one ever to use extra-quick GDDR5 memory.

Apart from a slightly reduced clock speed (625MHz), the Radeon HD 4850 is identical to the 4870.
The 512MB version of the Radeon HD 4870 is to be made available for the price of $299; the Radeon HD 4850 will be priced at $199.
AMD’s new line of products competes against Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 200 graphics processors, launched about one week ago. Apart from games, the GTX 280 can be used in numerous other activities; it is great for accelerating video playback, encoding, as well as for scientific processing.

The GTX 200 will make its debut with the GeForce GTX 260 (packing 896MB) for the price of $399 and with the GeForce GTX 280 (with 1GB of RAM) for $649.

AMD’s ATI Radeon 3870 X2 graphics card was launched at the end of January 2008. As the device mixes two microchips from its predecessor, ATI Radeon 3870, on one single board, the graphics card’s performance was simply doubled.

The new release is a big step forward for the company; however, whether or not customers will go for AMD’s products instead of those made by Nvidia, remains to be seen.