AMD To Launch Radeon HD4890 "RV790" In April

[onethreehill]

AMD is slated to launch the Radeon HD 4890 card based on the RV790 core in April not the rumored Radeon HD 4970. The RV790XT A11 sample is running at 850Mhz core at 1.3V and 975Mhz GDDR5 memory. In comparision, a Radeon HD 4870 (RV770) card runs at 750MHz core and 900MHz GDDR5 memory. AMD told their partners that RV790 is expected to be around 20% faster than the current Radeon HD 4870 RV770 card and will compete headon against the GeForce 285 GTX card. The pricing? Between US$199 to US$249.

Source: VR-Zone

Updated: RV790 is an OCed RV770?

Last year AMD got a great turnaround with the help of RV770, but now it seems somewhat weak in front of NVIDIA GT200 Series. After NVIDIA’s partners pushed out their self-designed GeForce GTX260, the launch of GeForce GTX285 and GeForce GTX295 have made NVIDIA even more confident in this battle.

What move will AMD take to fight back? RV790 has aroused interest from lots of people as well as 40nm RV740. According to our source, RV790 will be named as Radeon HD 4970, with core clock improved to 950MHz (compared with 750MHz on HD4870). The memory clock keeps unchanged as 900MHz (i.e.3600MHz GDDR5). Based on 55nm manufacturing process, RV790 will come with 800 stream processors just as RV770, not 960 ones as rumored.

With massive 27% improvement of core clock, RV790 may target at GeForce GTX285. Maybe you would think AMD is confusing us on purpose like what they did to RV770, but the informer believe there won’t be much change in specs. The availability and pricing of RV790 are not disclosed yet, but hardware-info says it would be announced in April........

Source:Expreview

[003]

Only 20% faster than the 285... no way that will compete head on. Price maybe, but not for sheer performance. But I bet it will overclock like crazy!

[CedricFP]

Only 20% faster than the 285... no way that will compete head on. Price maybe, but not for sheer performance. But I bet it will overclock like crazy!

20% faster than 4870 - which would put it on par roughly with the 285 - the competition would obviously be on the price front.

[Elfear]

Would a 100Mhz core bump really increase performance by 20%? IIRC, the 4870 has plenty of memory bandwidth so bumping it up shouldn't help all that much.

[Shadowmage]

Would a 100Mhz core bump really increase performance by 20%? IIRC, the 4870 has plenty of memory bandwidth so bumping it up shouldn't help all that much.

There might be additional functional units and other tweaks.

[Bobsama]

Sounds interesting.

[Sly Fox]

Certainly not unexpected. They are at least somewhat obligated to counter the 285.

It will be interesting to see what is packed onboard other than the mhz bump.

[vietthanhpro]

HD4890 has 800SP, core 850Mhz, mem 975 GDRAM 5, 20% faster !
ha ha..

[zanzabar]

i wounder how long until the 740 (hopefully march) and 790x2

[roofsniper]

rv790 is 40nm right? because this seems like it would be a pretty hot card. i thought the 4870 ran hot idk now.

[Telperion]

I don't see a 20% performance boost out of those specs either.

I guess we'll see.

[deathman20]

So I see a possible 13% increase with the clock speed going up. Other then that, you not much else in there to help it unless its driver driven what they expect to increase it the rest of the way.

[BeepBeep2]

rv790 is 40nm right? because this seems like it would be a pretty hot card. i thought the 4870 ran hot idk now.

With that little incy-weency cooler equivilent to what they stick on a Geforce 8600/9600 GT ;-)

If you could stick a cooler equiv. to the 285's cooler on the 4780 I bet it would have load temps around 30-35c.

Looking forward to this, I'm trying to make do on a 4850 atm.

[ColonelCain]

No way that 100mhz more core and 300mhz more on the memory will give 20% more.
Which means, there is more than meets the eye.

[BeepBeep2]

What if the core ran @ 900+ and the memory ran at 1000 or something...that would be sweet.

[ColonelCain]

I haven't got my 4870 1GB hooked up to my WC system yet, or I would try to get it up there.

Anyone with a voltmodded 4870 1GB care to try this out, to tell us if there are improvements in the core?

[Blacky]

lulz 20% with those minimal changes, waiting on AMD marketing graphs ...

[Telperion]

I'm getting 835 core on my 1GB Dark Knight, and even that stays under 61C, I just don't have enough voltage and unfortunately none of the volt mods work for me or I'd test it out.

[MsB]

Well if it is 20percent more performance the price is right

[IvanAndreevich]

If 20% is to be believed, there must be some difference in addition to the clockspeeds, plain and simple. More SP's, maybe radically new drivers..

[Macadamia]

There's a big percentage that this is not RV770 at all.


RV770 has gone to at least Revision A12. 790 must have some stuff changed inside to get back to a new revision slate (A10 and 11)

[Bo_Fox]

Yeah, I can recall the rumors of 960 shaders and 48 TMU's. It's a one-step increase, from 320 on a 3870, to 800 on 4870, and then 960 on a 4890 ( a 2:5:6 ratio). Same for 16 TMU's on 3870, 40 on 4870, and then 48 on 4890 (also a 2:5:6 ratio). It seems perfectly logical, and I think that if this were true, the claimed 20% performance increase would be an extremely modest one. The prices of $199-$249 are really exciting!

The other thing I could think of are tighter latency timings for GDDR5 memory.. but that still would not be enough for 20% increase without adding more shaders/TMU's.. Another hint is that it's no longer a RV770, but rather a RV790XT!

[naokaji]

rv790 is 40nm right? because this seems like it would be a pretty hot card. i thought the 4870 ran hot idk now.

No, the 48x0 cards don't put out a lot of heat, amd just prevents the fan from spinning up to keep them silent which leads to high temps, you can try it out, make a profile in ccc, change fan speed in profilename.xml file to higher than default and the temps drop like crazy, so it would be possible to cool a higher clocked 48x0 at 55nm as well, they would just need to sacrifice some of the silence for it.

[Telperion]

No, the 48x0 cards don't put out a lot of heat, amd just prevents the fan from spinning up to keep them silent which leads to high temps, you can try it out, make a profile in ccc, change fan speed in profilename.xml file to higher than default and the temps drop like crazy, so it would be possible to cool a higher clocked 48x0 at 55nm as well, they would just need to sacrifice some of the silence for it.

That, and it's just not the most effective cooler. I posted this shot on another forum of my Asus 4870 DK card:



All it takes is a decent heatsink and the card runs plenty cool.

[gOJDO]

If it has 800SP's then it is going to be 8~13% faster depending on game and settings, sometimes maybe less. But if it has 1000SP's like numerous rumors were indicating then it is going to be up to 40% faster. So in such case 20% in average makes sense.

Anyway, I won't believe in anything about the future ATi graphics cards until I have them in my hands.