ATI Launches HD 3850 and HD 3870 GPUs

ATI in a move that is sure to make its long-time fans happy, has finally shipped its much expected HD 3800 series of GPUs. The new cards that have been unveiled are the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870. Both are manufactured on a 55nm process and are among the first series of cards to support Directx 10.1 and also represent the first step in the launch of AMD's upcoming enthusiast platform codenamed "Spider."


These new graphics cards will be priced at two different price levels. The 3850 will be aimed at the $180 price market while the 3870 will be priced at $220. These price points put these cards squarely into the “performance level markets” according to AMD.

In their specifications the single-slot Radeon HD 3850 comes with 256MB of GDDR2 memory, with a core clock speed of 670MHz and memory clock speed of 1.66GHz. It also features 320 stream processors, PCI Express 2.0 system bus support and DirectX 10.1 support. The dual-slot 3870 has 512MB of GDDR4 memory, 775+MHz core clock speed and 2.25GHz memory clock speed,

"With the introduction of the ATI Radeon HD 3800 series we are redefining the market for enthusiast graphics with a new class of price, performance and features that have never been seen before in this industry," said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Graphics Product Group, AMD. "Through a flawless transition to 55nm and Microsoft DirectX® 10.1, we can deliver an unprecedented level of scalable performance, image quality enhancements and power efficiency at the sub- $200 segment that rivals today's most expensive graphics processors and opens up enthusiast gaming to more end users than ever before."