The video card market will change again in a few short months as it always seems to do with the release of a new Microsoft operating system and DirectX 11. The last major shift came about with the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and DirectX 10.0 which required a new interface and did not work in Windows XP. Today, virtually every video card sold is based upon DirectX 10.0 or 10.1 in the case of ATI cards and a few NVIDIA mobile parts.

ATI launched the HD 4870 in the summer of last year to a lot of praise due to its high performance, feature set and reasonable cost. They chose to have their HD 4870 compete against NVIDIA’s GTX 260 while their HD 4870 x2 dual chip card competed against NVIDIA’s high-end, the GTX 280. ATI generally releases new cards every 6-9 months on the high-end of things and the replacement for the HD 4870 was the HD 4890 which was a higher clocked card on the same chip basically as the HD 4870. Today I’m taking a look at the Sapphire Vapor-X HD 4890 2G GDDR5 card.

• 800 SPs
• 256-bit memory interface
• 2GB GDDR5 memory
• Factory overclocked at 870MHz
• Sapphire Patent Pending Black Diamond Choke
• Quiet and Powerful Dual Slot Vapor-Chamber Cooler, Under dBA in 2D Operation, under 30 dBA in 3D Operation below 85 degrees C
• Solid Capacitors
• 24x Custom Filter Anti-aliasing and high performance anisotropic filtering
• DirectX 10.1 support
• Dynamic geometry acceleration
• Game Physics processing capability
• ATI Avivo HD video and display technology
• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for Blu-ray and HD Video
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
• DVD Upscaling
• Dynamic Contrast
• Built-in HDMI with 7.1 surround sound support
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay Technology
• ATI Stream technology