Radeon 4800-series cards are now available for the masses. Radeon 4830 cards are expected to cost less than US$150 at retail, which is roughly the cost of an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT GPU (a chip that it matches up with very closely, at least on paper).
AMD today launched the new ATI Radeon 4830 graphics chip, a cheaper version of the critically successful 4850 and 4870 chips. It is targeted squarely at the mid-range and mainstream market.
Like the 4850 and 4870, the new Radeon 4830 supports DirectX 10.1 and ATI CrossFireX (for multi-GPU systems), but it does not have as many stream processors as the 4850/4870 models (it has 128 compared to 160 in the higher-end models).
It also runs at a slower clock speed -- 575MHz, compared to 625MHz for the 4850 – and only supports GDDR3 memory, where the higher-end model support GDDR3, 4 and 5.
While Nvidia may have an edge at the ultra-expensive end of the market with its GeForce GTX 200 series, AMD has had a good deal of success with the 4800 series, with a performance-per-dollar rating for the GPUs that matches or outpaces that of Nvidia.