I've had HD 4890 samples coming in for a few weeks now. With that said, I chose not to test the card straight away, because as we draw closer to NDA we see new drivers come out. What ended up happening, however, is that we saw the NDA change for these cards a few times. The HD 4890 was originally set to release two days before the GTX 275; ATI then put the pedal down some more and it was released almost a week early.

In response to this, NVIDIA pulled their NDA forward to the day after the HD 4890’s new launch. While this was all happening, HD 4890 samples were in hand but GTX 275 ones hadn't shipped yet; not just for me, but most writers around the world. Three days before the NDA was up on the GTX 275, three companies confirmed that NVIDIA made a last minute change to the memory clock and decided to drop it, hence the delay for samples. Apart from a few reference cards, this was going to be a paper launch, which was something that we had not become accustomed to seeing.