XFX seems to be ready with its initial lineup of graphics cards. Some European retailers have even begun listing their products and pricing. While there's nothing really interesting about the way XFX is pricing its cards, the way it's cards seem to be certainly interesting. Pictured below are its first two models based on the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 graphics processors.

Some surprises: Both use black coloured PCB, neither are 100% reference ATI design, and in fact, XFX designed its own cooler for the Radeon HD 4850 512 MB (model: XFX HD485X-YDFC). The Radeon HD 4870 in the picture is the 1 GB variant (model: HD487A-ZDFC). Bothaccelerators use AMD reference clock speeds. These cards will be released within the first two weeks of this month. More information as we come across.

It's been a really long time since we've seen anything new from ATI that would make us jump out of our seats and take notice. With NVIDIA spitting out new cards like nobody's business, ATI has remained quiet all this while. The first of the HD series from ATI, the HD 2900XT looked really good on paper having 320 shader units and a 512-bit memory bus. This was better than the top '8' series from NVIDIA. But when it came to real world performance it just couldn't keep up with the 8800GTX. It couldn't overtake the '8' series in the game tests but it did overtake it in the amount of power consumed.The next release was the HD 38xx series. It had the same amount of shader units but the memory bandwidth was cut into half (from 512-bit to 256-bit) but at the same time they were using GDDR4 memory, which worked at an impressive 2.25GHz. The cards were more than decent but couldn't keep up with the NVIDIA 8800GT, the performance card for budget conscious users. Given ATI's shaky drivers, this round once again went in NVIDIA's favour. It seemed like ATI just couldn't catch up. But now, times seem to have changed and the dark clouds are starting to clear. We have the much-hyped Radeon HD 4850 in our labs today. Even though this card isn't officially launched here (that will happen next week) we managed to get our hands on an evaluation sample. This card is touted to take on the 9800GTX, which is currently the fastest card under the 20K range. Let's see if ATI can break the jinx they have been under for a long time.