Very early tomorrow before Europe starts to work and after the noon time in Taiwan, ATI will officially launch Radeon HD 4870, the faster of its two mainstream / performance cards.

The big thing about Radeon HD 4870 is that this dual-slot card uses GDDR5 memory that gives you double the bandwidth of GDDR3, and that ATI was again first to make it happen.

Overall, the card is roughly fifteen percent faster than Radeon 4850, and it will sell for $329 in U.S. e-tail, while in Europe it should start selling tomorrow for €229 to €249 including tax.

It is a good step in right direction and yes, it is faster than Geforce 9800GTX, but we are not sure how it actually stands against Geforce GTX 260 as we are still about to see one.

Wednesday is Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 day and stay tuned; we might just finish our review at some point today.