AMD’s Radeon HD 4800 series has been an unqualified success for the firm. The HD 4850 and 4870 boards, priced in the $200-$300 range, brought amazing performance and feature sets and immediately reshaped the competitive GPU landscape. Despite these parts’ bang-for-buck value, though, NVIDIA was still able to claim the single-board performance crown with their new GeForce GTX 280. Yet the GTXs are based on large, power hungry chips and AMD has publicly stated a lack of interest in pursuing higher levels of performance through such designs, instead reaching for the bleeding edge through the use of dual-GPU boards comprised of smaller chips. Thus AMD seeks to grab the performance crown away from NVIDIA today with the launch of the Radeon HD 4870 X2.

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