The high-end of the video card market has been dominated by NVIDIA in the last few years with ATI taking a backseat to the architectural advantages that the GeForce 8xxx series had over their competing HD 2900 series. It was especially daunting in that their card was over 6 months late to the party, underperformed and drew more power. ATI had to compete on price/performance and that hurt their competitive position in the market place.

ATI recently released their HD 4870 card which did not have the horsepower to compete with NVIDIA’s best, but had the price/performance to be a great seller. Today ATI reclaims the performance crown with a bang with the launch of their new card, the Radeon HD 4870 X2. NVIDIA lowered prices on their cards to compete, leading to interesting competitive pressures. Palit was kind enough to send a review sample of the new card and that is the card on the test bench today.