The AMD Radeon HD 4000-series of GPUs is one of those company “secrets” that no one actually tries to hide.  AMD has gone out of their way to discuss these products without exactly disclose all the details - just this week we were at a “Cinema 2.0″ event AMD hosted that described the architecture without detailing the product.  The scheduled release for the RV770 parts, the HD 4850 and HD 4870, were scheduled for just this next week.

Well someone in Europe didn’t get the memo, cards went on sale and thus our NDA on HD 4850s was lifted.  The result?  You cannot get a very quick preview of HD 4850 performance.  We aren’t supposed to be talking about the architecture, or the HD 4870, so let’s just cut to the chase…

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