AMD's RADEON 4890 Review

The longer I am in the review business, the more the evolution of personal computer performance strikes me as nothing short of breathtaking. Aside from the raw CPU performance, the main improvements are in the world of computer graphics. Needless to say that neither one of the two big survivors in today's graphic scene was even around when we played the first computer games on Amiga and Atari ST machines. Today we have AMD formerly known as ATI and nVidia battling it out over and again. Missing in action are Hercules, Tseng Labs, ALi, SiS, Kyro and Trident. Everybody else, including Intel, Via and Matrox, is just playing a wallflower role with the only realistic chance to break into the duo-poly coming from Intel's mystery architecture called Larrabee.

For the time being, the market is ruled by the red and the green teams pursuing somewhat different strategies with respect to clock speed vs. parallelism. At this point we are not too concerned with nVidia, PhysX or Cuda - courtesy of their PR department - instead we are focusing on AMD's latest and greatest product available as RADEON 4890 and/or RADEON 4890 OC with the moniker designating higher clock speed for core and memory. Most importantly, the RADEON 4890 will also be the last high end GPU released by AMD that is manufactured on a 55 nm process before the 4700 series based on a 40 nm design kicks in.