Diamond Multimedia has announced the immediate availability of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card, offering 512 MB of graphics memory, 480 stream processors, a 625 MHz clock speed and a 993 MHz memory bus, all on a single-slot PCIE 2.0 card that supports ATI’s CrossFireX technology for upgrading to up to four GPUs. The HD 4850 also wraps in ATI’s TeraScale engine for pushing high frame rates, and ATI’s Unified Video Decoder 2 for handling high-definition H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video without taxing the CPU.
The HD 4850 also supports features like Blu-ray picture-in-picture, along with DirectX 10.1 games and (of course) Windows Vista’s Aero interface. The card also ships with a 60-day trial of BitDefender‘s GameSafe software, which postpones automatic scans, alerts, and pop-ups so background processes don’t suck CPU cycles away from what’s important to users—games.
Diamond Multimedia prides itself on the quality of products it puts to market, and notes that fewer than one percent of video cards its sells are returned. ATI Radeon HD 4850 is available now from a number of retailers at a suggested price of $199.99.
