The dual-GPU card packs two HD 4800 graphic chips, said to provide "2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU power," and 2GB of GDDR5 memory. To illustrate the card's performance, ATI provided the above benchmarks, comparing the HD 4870 X2 to rival Nvidia's GTX 280.

At present, the HD 4870 X2 is only available from online system builders such as Alienware and Falcon Northwest, carrying a suggested price of $549, with the card expected to hit retailers shortly.

A pared-down version that sports 1GB of GDDR3 memory, dubbed the Radeon HD 4850 X2, is slated to hit in September for around $399, according to TechReport.

Complete details on 4870 X2 and the benchmark machine follow:

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Features:

• 2 GB of GDDR5 memory
• 2.4 teraFLOPS of GPU power
• DirectX 10.1
• 1600 stream processing units
• 2 x 256-bit memory interface
• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
• Dual mode ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
• PCI Express 2.0 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
  • Integrated DisplayPort
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay technology

Benchmark Machine Specs:

Drivers
• ATI: 8.501.1 Sample_vista_HD_4800_Series_4
• NVIDIA: 175.35 WHQL
System Configurations
• AMD Phenom X4 9950 (2.6GHz)
• MSI K9A2 (790FX)/ASUS M3N-HT DLX (780a)
• 4GB DDR2-800 5-5-5-18
• Windows VISTA Ultimate SP1 64bit