Multiple sources have told us that they learned the RV790 might be branded Radeon HD 4890 and this card should just launch at some point in April. It is definitely going to be faster than te current Radeon HD 4870 and it beats the GeForce GTX 260, even the 55nm one and we are quite sure it will come close to the GeForce GTX 285 performance, but there is a realistic chance NVIDIA might still be faster with the GeForce GTX 285. Bear in mind that the Radeon HD 4890 is the name that ATI is throwing to many people, but the company can change this in a heartbeat. They did it before with the Radeon 3800 series when everyone expected another Radeon HD 2900 generation graphics card. - FudZilla

AMD RV790 Chip To Become Radeon HD 4890 Edition

We learned some bits and pieces on ATI's upcoming RV790 chip and we can now happily confirm that his is yet another 55nm chip from ATI. As we said last week, the RV790 chip is not the same as the RV770, it has some architectural improvements and should run faster clock to clock, but we don't know many fixed details. The notebook version of the chip is already out in the wild and it should be shipping in April time in ASUS notebooks, which means that the desktop chip is much closer than many expected. Did we forget to mention that the RV790 is a 55nm, not a 40nm chip? If we did forget, well you know it now.

The company didn't want to postpone the introduction of the new card in the performance segment and therefore did it in 55nm, while the RV740 remains the first 40nm chipset. The RV740 just launched as a mobile chip, and we've seen it up and running, while the desktop part should arrive in the next month or two. The new chip is a new architecture, but with some basic concepts taken from the RV770, that is why the chip will be significantly faster than anything based on the RV770 chipset. Now it is not just a speed bump and a better batch of RV770 based Radeon HD 4870 chips, it is a newer and better chip.

It looks like this new chip will beat the GeForce GTX 260, and it could even get close to the GeForce GTX 285, but at a much more affordable price. Of course it remains to be seen if NVIDIA will just sit back and relax or will somehow launch their own counter attack by also releasing some kind of updated revision.