AMD doubles up, announces ATI HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2

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Eran Badit of NGOHQ.com has already made some considerable progress getting PhysX to run on AMD hardware, and it looks like he's now getting a helping hand from a somewhat unexpected source, with NVIDIA itself reportedly giving the project its blessing. Apparently, NVIDIA has even gone so far as to invite Badit to join its developer program, which gives him access to documentation, SDKs and, most importantly, direct access to hardware and NVIDIA engineers, a move that Badit describes as "impressive, inspiring and motivating." Badit is decidedly less impressed by AMD, however, which has apparently been unwilling to provide with any hardware or support for the project. That stubborn stance, he surmises, can only be due to AMD's backing of Intel's Havok physics engine, which NVIDIA would no doubt like to have out of the picture (hence its willingness to help here).

AMD's on a roll at Computex, and it's keeping the stream alive with two more decently important announcements. First off, the company is making the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 official, which is said to "triple top-of-the-line graphics performance in comparison to the previous generation ATI Mobility Radeon GPUs." The unit also enables laptop makers to include CrossFireX technology for the first time, so yeah, there's that. Moving on, we've got the low down on its PowerXpress technology, which enables users to "double or triple the performance of the integrated graphics processor when plugged into a wall socket or extend their battery life by over an hour while on the go." In actuality, it's a variant of ATI Hybrid Graphics Technology for lappies, giving folks the option to switch between a Mobility Radeon HD 3400 series GPU and an integrated AMD M780G without the need for a reboot. If your eyebrows just perked up, you can snag said tech on select Fujitsu-Siemens machines right now. All the gory details are linked below -- enjoy!
NVIDIA had already heard enough about AMD's ATI Radeon 4800 series to bump up the launch date for its GeForce 9900 series cards, but TG Daily has now apparently turned up some more launch details for the mid-to-high-end cards, the first of which is reportedly now on track for a release in mid-June. That first card will be the Radeon 4850, codenamed "Makedon," which will boast 512 MB of GDDR3 memory, single-slot cooling, CrossFireX support, and a price tag between $189-$219. That'll be followed in July by a pair of Radeon 4870 cards (dubbed "Trojan"), with one boasting 512MB of GDDR5 memory and the other boasting a full 1024MB, the latter of which will come with a dual-slot cooler. Look for those to cost between costing between $249 and $279. The whole lot of them will also pack "game physics processing capability," along with 7.1 channel audio via HDMI support, DirectX 10.1 support, and, as you might have guessed, some pretty heavy power requirements, with a 450 watt power supply needed for a single card and 550 watts needed for a CrossFire setup.






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