This comes as a major surprise, because it was widely expected that ATI will debut its RV770 chip first, followed by Nvidia's summer part. But as it stands right now, Nvidia has the pole position in a new round of the graphics wars. Of course, the GT200 and RV770 are actually not entirely comparable, because of their huge price difference. But performance-wise, we're in for a possibly close race.

ATI's Radeon 4800 series will be introduced in three flavors - as 4850, 4870 and 4870 X2. The company will also offer a “4850 256MB” (as opposed to 512 MB in other versions), but this SKU is a so-called "option" and is geared towards to the OEM/ODM/SI crowd to support them with cheaper parts for the back-to-school period and beyond.

The Radeon 4850, code-named “Makedon,” is AMD's launch board. The name, by the way, is likely to refer to Terry "Catalyst" Makedon, group manager for software and video in the AMD (ATI) graphics division. Of course, there is a small chance that Alexander The Great (Alexandros Megas, Alexandar Makedonski) may have influenced the naming, but somehow we feel that Terry has won this time.

You can read the entire article at TG Daily.