The battle for your money among the graphics chipset manufacturers is fierce and harsh. None the less, it's competitive which brings prices down and makes technology evolve faster. We see new solutions and graphics card models much quicker than anticipated. So if company green releases a product, company red will release something to counteract. And vice versa of course.

As you guys know, last week NVIDIA released the Core 216 version of the GeForce GTX 260, a small update over the previous three month old GTX 260 product that allows it to compete with the Radeon HD 4870 slightly better yet at an attractive price.

Therefore it was no surprise to me that a few days after reviewing that product Outlook made that wicked yet sometimes irksome 'ploink' noise with an email from AMD - 'Hey Hilbert, we have a 1GB version of the Radeon HD 4870, check it out please'. Obviously ATI is releasing a 1GB model to compete with the new Core 216 version of that GeForce GTX 260.

Actually it's pretty clever when you think of it. The 4870 series really diggs that GDDR5 memory bandwidth, and what's the cheapest thing to do to gain some extra performance? Increase the framebuffer volume. Now that by itself is not going to work miracles, yet in memory limited situations (loads of high quality textures, filtering and AA modes) it will help you here and there. And a little bit of extra bite is all the product needs to get past that Core 216 card again.

So that's what we'll do today folks, we'll review the 1024 MB version Radeon HD 4870. Personally, I love it... but can it compete with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 260 Core 216? Well, let's find out...