ATI MidRange Products: the Radeon HD 4600 and HD 4500 Series
 

Now that the high end cards of ATI have been played we're eagerly awaiting to see what they'll will bring out for the mid-range and low-end. Since the HD 4850 is competitively priced at the €130-150 mark the upcoming HD 4600 and 4500 series are bound to more more affordable. These new cards will support DirectX 10.1 out of the box and also give you HD video acceleration with sound and video over HDMI. We can expect 256/512Mb onboard memory with maybe even a few 1Gb cards later on.


The HD 4850 went head to head with the Geforce 9600 GT (and even 8800GT(X)/9800GT(X)). The HD 4600 series will go up against the Geforce 9500 GT. The Radeon HD 4670 aims to best the Geforce 9500GT GDDR3 while the HD 4650 will go up against the DDR2 equipped 9500GT.


The HD 4500 series goes up against the upcoming Geforce 9400 GT card while the previous generation HD 3450 will take on the 9300 GS.


The back to school period will be an interesting one this year with plenty of affordable 3D cards packing quite a bit of punch.