Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 4850 will both have a whopping 800 Shaders. The previous generation had 320, and as you can see we are now talking about more than double the number.

ATI will market its cards as TeraScale engine capable and as we’ve suggested before RV770 will reach 1 TeraFlop processing power.

With 800 Shader processors at 625MHz the Radeon HD 4850 can reach 1000 GigaFlops or 1 TeraFlop, while Radeon HD 4870 at 750MHz would reach 1.2 TeraFlop. People have reported that the card will end up with 480 shaders, but the number is bigger. The big issue for ATI is that its 480 Shaders might end up much slower than Nvidia's 240. This was always the case in the past and Nvidia's Shaders are usually clocked at higher than GPU frequency.

We believe that ATI’s Shaders were quite transistor cheap, as the RV770 die won’t be much bigger compared to RV670; and these numbers actually do bring some optimism.