AMD ‘Officially’ Launches Radeon 4870, declares cinema dead.

In a previous post Doug mentioned the spiffy ‘real-time rendered’ animation AMD (ATI) showed at a press event, declaring it the birth of ‘Cinema 2.0′. Hyperbole aside this week AMD has annnounced their new ‘King’ of graphics cards, the Radeon 4870. Ringing in at the $300 USD range it is certainly a much better buy than the new Nvidia GTX 280 launched last week, at $650! However unlike the Nvidia card the 4870 is not available in stores yet (due at the end of June), whereas the GTX 280 could be bought from day 1.

What card is the best choice? Well for the gamer the benchmarks do show that the 4870 is a very powerful card for the money, however the ace that Nvidia has up their sleeve, especially if you do more than game (for all you content creators…) is that Nvidia will soon be releasing drivers that will unlock for, all 8 series cards and above, onboard physics processing and support of Cuda, which promises the much, including hardware video encoding acceleration and photoshop filter processing…Adode will be supporting GPU acceleration through Cuda when they release photoshop CS4. Sadly for those creators using OsX there is no support announced yet for Cuda.

Here are a few links to various hardware review sites for the 4870, and most of them have benchmarks for a wide variety of other cards such as the Nvidia GTX 280, 260, and new Radeon 4850 so you can get a clear picture of how your current card stacks up. Interestingly with the current price of the Nvidia 8800GT, if you have an SLI motherboard, 2 of those are today’s best value.

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