After the launch of the new GTX 260 and 280, AMD seemed to be increasingly buried and we all believed that Nvidia would be alone and without competition in the manufacture of graphic chipsets.

AMD showed us a little of its move just a few days ago when they launched its new HD 4850, however despite the excellent quality-price ratio it was not enough to take the new GTX out of the podium.

But the unexpected performance of this new card surprised everybody including Nvidia, they simply can't match the spectacular performance/price ratio of the Radeon card.

The new Radeon HD 4870 is the dream of AMD to recover from the crisis they live. Based on the same architecture of the HD 4850 but with higher performance it is slowly beginning to be available, but can it really beat the competition.

As we can see the HD 4870 runs the game a little smoother than the GTX 260. But the performance it's not enough to take the lead.

The results of Test Drive Unlimited are impressive, Radeon almost beats GTX 280, an excellent result especially if it's take into account that the nvidia graphics has twice the memory.

In the most "heavy" game on the market Radeon performed very well and again almost took the lead from GTX 280.

The power consumption of the Radeon is very high and here Nvidia takes the lead with their two low-power/high-performance graphics card

The HD 4870 is very quiet almost the same of the 3870 X2, and it actually is few dB more silent than it's cheaper sister HD 4850.

In temperature Radeons are unquestionably the hottest.

The new AMD card is a dream for those who want a card for half the price than it's competition with almost the same performance.

And why not an HD 4870 Crossfire for the price of an GTX 280.

Below you can see the results of the new AMD HD Series crossfire in several applications.