For a period there every six to eight months or so we'd see a new GPU and leaps of performance gained from the cards that had just come out but over the past few years this seems to have slowed down and for better of worse since ATI released the Radeon 4870 last June there haven't been too many major jumps ahead of that card except of course the 4870X2 and not much from Nvidia as well. Mid-range has seen tremendous improvement, however, offering phenomenal value in the sub-$100 market but above it things have slowed down. Recently AMD did at last follow the 4870 up with the Radeon 4890 which we looked at launch and now with some time since then we're seeing 1GHz variants of the 4890 and non-reference cards. Today we'll be looking at one of these non-reference design cards with the Sapphire Radeon 4890 Vapor-X.

http://www.amdzone.com/index.php/rev...e-4890-vapor-x