Originally the announcement of Radeon HD 4850 was planned in this week, but AMD decided to postpone this event on June 25. It was considered that the announcement of Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, was delayed to the new memory type GDDR-5. Now AMD scheduled the announcement of Radeon HD 4870 for 8 July , but partners already shipped the appropriate graphics card, and sales may start even before the announcements.

Associate compared the Crossfire Radeon HD 4850 and SLI of two GeForce 9800 GTX. Note that a pair of GeForce 9800 GTX graphics cards constitutes an adequate competitor for the pair of Radeon HD 4850.

Here are the characteristics of Radeon HD 4850 :
- 55 nm RV770 core area 256 to 965 million ² transistors;
- Support DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0;
- 800 Shader processors, 40 texture units and 16 blocks rop's;
- 256 - bit bus;
- 512 MB GDDR3 memory ;
- 625/1986 MHz frequencies;
- Power consumption not more than 110 W;
- One additional power connector ;
- Support Crossfire X and UVD;
- The recommended retail price is $ 199.
AMD Rv770 has a compact size and low energy consumption.
Note in idle state AMD video frequency is reduced to 160/1000 MHz. Now the Radeon HD 4850 consumes less power compared with the GeForce 9800 GTX.
Two video card Radeon HD 4850 is often faster than a GeForce GTX 280, but let us note the 280 GTX card sometimes loses over the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2, and even the two GeForce 8800 GT. However, problems with multi card solutions is not resolved - in some games two Radeon HD 4850 does not demonstrate a high speed.
Currently most motherboard support Crossfire. In fact, most motherboards for Intel chipsets has two slots for video card installation . For SLI technology user require NVIDIA chipsets , which are more expensive .