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In stark contrast to NVIDIA's $650 GPU launch earlier this week, AMD is letting us make an early introduction of the Radeon HD 4850 today. Priced at $199, the Radeon HD 4850 is as fast as, if not faster, than a GeForce 9800 GTX. And in an unexpected move, NVIDIA has also dropped the price on the 9800 GTX to $199 in order to compete....

The battle between ATI and NVIDIA reached a tense moment today when ATI removed the gag order on the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card by more than a week. NVIDIA was trying to spoil the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 by launching an ultra secret graphics card called the GeForce 9800 GTX+! Read on as we benchmark the Radeon HD 4850 versus the GeForce 9800 GTX+!

How well does the GeForce 9800 GTX+ overclock? We set off to answer that question today by finding the limit of our card and running a number of benchmarks to see just how well it does. Our original review showed that the GeForce 9800 GTX+ was 10.4% faster than the Radeon HD 4850, so any gains should be money in the bank. Read on to see how NVIDIA's first 55nm GPU overclocks on the GeForce 9800 GTX+ video card!

The scheduled release for ATI's upcoming RV770 parts, the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870, was scheduled for next week, but it seems that it got bumped up to today. Some European e-tailer has started to sell cards and AMD/ATI had no choice other than to remove our gag order on the video cards we already have. Read on to check out our preview and see what NVIDIA did to spoil it - GeForce 9800 GTX+!!!

As we saw in our review of the ASUS EAH4870 Radeon HD 4870 graphics card, the Radeon HD 4870 was very much superior to high-end graphics cards like the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+. It was also about 2-2.5X faster than its predecessor, the Radeon HD 3870. Now, that is what you call a quantum leap ahead in performance!

We first covered the launch of the new NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ on June 20, 2008. Launched right after the GT 200 series of graphics cards, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ is die-shrinked version of the venerable NVIDIA G92 GPU, used in cards like the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and the GeForce 8800 GT.

Thanks to the die-shrink from 65 nm to 55 nm, NVIDIA was able to further boost the core and shader clock speeds of the GPU by 9.3%. Everything else was unchanged, including the memory clock which remained at 1.1 GHz. Hence, NVIDIA called it the GeForce 9800 GTX+ (Plus), instead of the GeForce 9900 GTX.

As we saw it our review of the ASUS ENGTX260 TOP graphics card, the standard NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 is hardly a competitor for the much faster ATI Radeon HD 4870. That's why GeForce GTX 260 is now cheaper than the Radeon HD 4870. Only the factory-overclocking of the ASUS ENGTX260 TOP allowed it to achieve a rough parity in performance with the Radeon HD 4870.

As we saw it our review of the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+, the card is really just a minor improvement of the GeForce 9800 GTX. Other than the use of the smaller and cooler version of the G92 GPU, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ has a slightly higher core clock speed. Its GDDR3 memory clock speed remained at 1.1 GHz. Hence, the minor addition of a + (plus) to its name, instead of a full number change.

NVIDIA just launched the GeForce 9800 GX2 video card with a pair of 600MHz G92 GPUs, 256 stream processors running at 1.5GHz and 1GB GDDR3 memory operating at 2GHz. We have a couple XFX GeForce 9800 GX2 cards on hand and the performance numbers are very impressive. Read on to see how the GeForce 9800 GX2 does against a number of other video cards!