AMD, Nvidia Release 'Most Powerful' Graphics

On Thursday,2nd April 2009, both AMD and Nvidia released updates to their graphics cards, AMD with the Radeon HD 4890 reference card and Nividia with the GeForce GTX 275.
Picture left: ExtremeTech summarizes the new architectures----
Technically, both cards are extensions of existing architectures. Both AMD and Nvidia have shifted away from monolithic graphics monstrosities into a business model that attempts to facilitate older integrated graphics to work together with a newer graphics card, and push PC gamers into buying one graphics card now, buying another later, and pairing them together to gain more performance. According to an ExtremeTech review of the AMD Radeon HD 4890 and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 275, Nvidia's card is faster not taking into account what AMD claims is an extensive overclocking threshold, which OEMs and enthusiasts will take advantage of.

ATI Radeon HD 4890 1024 MB
Street price: $249 or $229 after a rebate.
Manufacturer: HIS technology
SKU code: H489QT
Improved heat sink in adding a heat pipe, and have improved drivers. AMD claims that HD 4890 can easily reach just shy of 1GHz on the core and 1050MHz+ on the memory without touching the voltages. If you wanted to tinker with the voltages and add a better cooling solution, AMD claims you might even be able to reach higher!
ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 System Requirements

* PCI Express® based PC is required with one X16 lane graphics slot available on the motherboard
* 500 Watt or greater power supply with two 75W 6-pin PCI Express® power connectors recommended (600 Watt and four 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode)
* Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
* Minimum 1GB of system memory
* Installation software requires CD-ROM drive
* DVD playback requires DVD drive
* Blu-ray™ playback requires Blu-ray drive
* For a complete ATI CrossFireX™ system, a second ATI Radeon™ HD 4890 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per graphics card (included) are required
Read More Overview at AMD site

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The NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 275 GPU with CUDA™
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Street price: $250
The GeForce GTX 275 is based on the GT200 architecture, featuring 240 shader processors operating at 1404MHz, using the very same 55nm GPU as the GeForce GTX 285, with the full 240 Shader processors. The GeForce GTX 275 differs from the GeForce GTX 285 as it has two fewer memory ICs, so it has a total frame buffer size of 896MB instead of the 1GB. The interesting fact os the GTX 275 cards are clocked fairly high on the core and shader domains, in fact it will even come close to the GTX 285, yet at a significantly lower price, making this product very fast.




Read More Overview at Nividia site

NVIDIA® CUDA™ is a general purpose parallel computing architecture that leverages the parallel compute engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) to solve many complex computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a CPU. It includes the CUDA Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and the parallel compute engine in the GPU. To program to the CUDATM architecture, developers can, today, use C, one of the most widely used high-level programming languages, which can then be run at great performance on a CUDATM enabled processor. Other languages will be supported in the future, including FORTRAN and C++.


VIA

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