AMD show up Nvidia with twin GPU card

By Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 13 August 2008 08:55

Entertainment

AMD has ignited the video card wars again unveiling the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, a small form factor card with the power of two GPU’s.  AMD have also teamed up with World Of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo developer Blizzard.

Two GPU’s  (Graphics Processing Unit) running cooler and on a smaller card is the new slap in the face offering that AMD have put to rival Nvidia in the competitive video card hardware war.

According to AMD spokesperson Matt Skinner, the new ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 will provide a performance boost of 30 to 50 percent over Nvidia’s flagship GTX280 graphics card.

"We wanted to develop a graphics card for enthusiasts," he said. "We developed a chip targeted at performance. And then we took two of those chips and put them on one card. People have tried to build bigger chips, but the problem has been heat and cost. It's difficult for them to put two on one board because of space and power limitations."

The twin GPU card boasting 2GB of onboard memory is expected to deliver 2.4 teraflops of visual processing power.

It's "the world's fastest graphics card," according to AMD, which has priced the initial shipments at US$549.

In other AMD news, a new partnership has been Blizzard Entertainment, creators of such games as World of WarCraft, and the upcoming Diablo III and StarCraft II, to provide bundling of games with ATI Radeon graphics products.

The partnership came out of the exclusive sponsorship deal AMD struck with Blizzard leading up to BlizzCon 2008 in Anaheim later this year.