ATI Radeon 4850 to challenge NVIDIA dominance

It's been a long time coming. NVIDIA has ruled the graphics market for quite a long time now. Its 8-series graphics cards, led by the GeForce 8800 ULTRA, were untouchable on both performance and price.

ATI didn't know what had hit it. Its parent company, AMD, was being pummelled by Intel in the CPU market. And it was being pulverized by NVIDIA on the GPU side of things.

But all of that looks like it might be about to change. ATI has been threatening to make a big comeback for a while – the Radeon 3850 is a very powerful card. But things have taken a step forward this week. Not only have NVIDIA's 9800 cards been an epic disappointment, but ATI is now producing some kick-ass cards of its own.

Radeon 4850 is brilliant

ATI released its new Radeon 4800 series cards today; we've been playing with the 4850 model for a few days now. And frankly, it's absolutely brilliant.

Just when we thought ATI was content with playing second-fiddle to NVIDIA, it springs a new product range which competes favourably with Nvidia's latest offerings in terms of performance, while blowing NVIDIA out of the water on price.

At £130, the ATI Radeon 4850 is an absolute steal. And there's more to come, too.

Radeon 4870 threatens greatness

Our unit of the high-end Radeon 4870 is arriving tomorrow and the early signs are that this could be the one that truly sets a new benchmark in terms of price and performance combined.

The most powerful card on the market right now is the recently-launched NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280. However, we reckon the 4870 will get to within 80% of the 280's performance while costing half the price. Sounds pretty good, huh?

Tune in tomorrow for our review of the GeForce GTX 280, and we'll also be reviewing the 4870 early next week.

But in the meantime, feast your eyes on our full review of the stunningly good ATI Radeon 4850.