Sapphire may have sneaked this one in ahead of the official launch, but now AMD's caught up and announced the 1GHz ATI Radeon HD 4890 itself.

With a cheery claim that the card delivers "50 per cent more [rendering power] than that of the competition’s best single-GPU solution", AMD went on to state that releasing the first gigahertz graphics card using standard air cooling was "a notable engineering milestone".

Arrogant Marketing Department, anyone?

To put figures to the claim, the 1GHz GPU speed and use of GDDR 5 memory for the video buffer yields 1.6 trillion floating point operations per second, AMD said. That's a lot of in-game eye-candy in anyone's book.

Expect a deluge of 1GHz HD 4890 boards from all the usual suspects. ®