Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) officially launched its 4800 series graphics cards in India -- the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870 are finally, and officially here. Check out our review of the HD 4850 to get up to speed on the performance of this baby (hint: it's good).

Speaking on the key advancements made for the latest GPU, Raja Koduri, chief technology officer (Products Group) of AMD, said that AMD has worked upon the design efficiency of its latest GPUs to improve the price-to-performance ratio. "From an application stand point, we have delivered a graphic supercomputer for gamers with its teraflops compute power, whose purpose is to deliver stunning images," he said.

Design efficiency is measured by how much performance you can get off of the board that you buy for a given amount of money. How much performance increase are you getting compared to last year, and for what price. So in this generation of GPUs at a $200 price point, you can get a GPU that gives you double the performance for every watt of power consumed.

Koduri added, "semiconductor chips in general are one area where size does matter. The smaller the chip, the better -- especially if it boasts the same functionalities and at the same performance level. To give consumers an idea about what we've been able to achieve with the 4800 series -- the GTX200 from Nvidia that was introduced a month ago, is a 576 sq mm chip and more than twice as large as the 4800 series. That translates to more consumption of power as well as more cost ($600) for this new Nvidia chip."

The issue with putting a bigger chip, Koduri said, is that you can only put one chip into the computer because it takes up all the power; whereas in the case of smaller chips, you can add a multiple of them. Koduri's statement underlines AMD's strategy this generation -- to use smaller chips in parallel and to scale up performance with price, instead of offering a single large chip, like Nvidia is doing with its GT200 GPU.

He also mentioned that the maximum power consumed by the 4800 series is 160W and by the GT200 is 236W, which is 76W higher. Other key metrics for comparison are the performance per sq mm and performance per Watt. AMD has 3X advantage over Nvidia in the performance per sq mm and twice the price-to-watt advantage. It is important to note here that while AMD's latest chip draws less maximum power, it is known to get very hot; hotter than the GT200 at times, which makes use of intelligent power management techniques to keep its temperature down, relatively speaking.

The two boards introduced by ATI/AMD will be available in a variety of clock ranges, power ranges, and performance ranges from AMD partners in the course of the next six months.

Along with the launch announcement of the two cards, AMD gave a sneak peek of Bollywood 2.0 -- the Indian moniker for Cinema 2.0, a technology that aims to revolutionize the way we watch movies, as well as the way we play video games.

With Bollywood 2.0, AMD, in collaboration with creative software developers, aims to merge cinema and gaming interactivity. It aims to equally excite both game content creators, as well as the end users - the gamers.

The technology currently has the capability to create fusion of dynamic real-time interactivity with convincing cinematic digital effects to offer computer generated imagery that appears as real as cinema, according to AMD.

Explaining the strategy behind the Cinema 2.0 technology, Chris Hook of AMD said, "This is a whole new day in terms of sensory entertainment. Now you can interact with cinema; now video games are going to look as good as cinema. We've introduced a revolutionary GPU after working with some of the most visionary technologists in Hollywood and Bollywood to make this happen."

The ATI Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870 are available for $200 and $300 respectively. You can read about their specifications here.