ATI Radeon 4770

  The video card wars between ATI and Nvidia have been very hot lately with the most recent exchange a couple of weeks ago with the Radeon 4890 and GTX 275. That said even though those GPUs are a bargain at just over $200 AMD have been paying attention and realize that the market with the most growth is the $100 market where their next attack lines with the Radeon HD 4770 which is released today and we'll be taking a look at. The biggest news about the Radeon 4770 is that it the first GPU built on the 40nm process, which is 5nm lower than Intel and AMD's best current CPUs. This should mean much lower power consumption, less heat, and cheaper to manufacture, all good things. We'll see how much more when we get to testing, however, keep in mind though that the 3870 and 4870 were both built at the same 55nm manufacturing process but one was obviously much better than the other. These days it seems it is on the second generation with a new design we really see the best from this shift to a smaller manufacturing process. The other major point about the 4770 is that it uses GDDR5 which previously mid-range cards from ATI did not have with only the 4870 and 4890 with this more advanced memory. Prices have come down though and ATI believe GDDR5 is a good fit with the 4770 which should give it twice the bandwidth over GDDR3 memory. As you can see for cooling the card uses a dual slot cooler which is unusual for a mid-range card. Don't worry about heat or noise though as the card runs very cool and also is very quiet. Perhaps they learned from the far too Radeon 4850 graphics cards. It also is fairly short card but still requires a 6-pin PCI-E power connector. Other than that, most of the major features of the Radeon 4000 series are here, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, DX 10.1, PCI-Express 2.0 support, DVD upscaling, HDMI with 7.1 audio, and advanced PowerPlay management. Here's a comparison to other ATI cards on the market.   ATI Radeon 4770 ATI Radeon 4850 ATI Radeon 4830 ATI Radeon 4890 ATI Radeon 4670 Stream Processors 640 800 640 800 320 Core Clock 750MHz 625MHz 575MHz 850MHz 750MHz Memory Clock 800MHz GDDR5 1GHz GDDR3 900MHz GDDR3 975MHz GDDR5 1GHz GDDR3 Manufacturing 40nm 55nm 55nm 55nm 55nm   As you can see the 4770 is an odd combination of GDDR5 with less stream processors than 4850. We'll see what this adds up to performance wise.     Here are the full technical specs. Feature Summary 826 million transistors on 40nm fabrication process PCI Express®2.0 x16 bus interface GDDR5 memory Microsoft®DirectX®10.1 support Shader Model 4.1 32 bit floating point texture filtering Indexed cube map arrays Independent blend modes per render target Pixel coverage sample masking Read/write multi‐sample surfaces with shaders Gather4 texture fetching Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture 640 stream processing units Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors 128‐bit floating point precision for all operations Command processor for reduced CPU overhead Shader instruction Up to 128 texture fetches per clock cycle Up to 128 textures per pixel Fully associative multi‐level texture cache design DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192) Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs Double sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer Early Z test and Fast Z Clear Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1) Lossless color compression (up to 8:1) Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti‐aliasing Accelerated physics processing Dynamic Geometry Acceleration High performance vertex cache Programmable tessellation unit Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance Anti-aliasing features Multi-sample antialiasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel) and constant caches Up to 24x Custom Filter AntiAliasing (CFAA) Adaptive supersampling and multi‐sampling Gamma correct Super AA (ATI CrossFireX? configurations only7) All antialiasing features compatible with HDR rendering Texture filtering features 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel) 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma) Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support OpenGL 3.0 support ATI Avivo? HD Video and Display Platform1 Unified Video Decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC, VC‐1, and MPEG‐2 video formats High definition (HD) playback of Bluray and HD DVD video2 Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support DirectX® Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support Support for BD‐Live certified applications Hardware DivX and MPEG1 video decode acceleration ATI Avivo HD Video Post Processor1 Color space conversion Chroma subsampling format conversion Horizontal and vertical scaling Gamma correction Advanced vector adaptive perpixel deinterlacing De‐blocking and noise reduction filtering Detail enhancement Color vibrance and flesh tone correction Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull down correction) Bad edit correction Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)9 Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment Two independent display controllers Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display Full 30‐bit display processing Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30bit color quality on 24bit and 18bit displays High quality pre and postscaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs Contentadaptive deflicker filtering for interlaced displays Fast, glitch free mode switching Hardware cursor Two integrated duallink DVI display outputs Each supports 18, 24, and 30bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single‐link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual‐link DVI)3 Each includes a dual‐link HDCP encoder with on‐chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content4 Two integrated 400 MHz 30‐bit RAMDACs Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363 DisplayPort output support 24 and 30bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16003 HDMI output support All display resolutions up to 1920x10803 Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi‐channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC‐3, AAC, DTS5, enabling a plug‐and‐play audio solution over HDMI Integrated AMD Xilleon? HDTV encoder Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S‐video/composite) Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions Underscan and overscan compensation Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time VGA mode support on all display outputs ATI PowerPlay? technology6 Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings PerformanceonDemand Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario Clock and memory speed throttling Voltage switching Dynamic clock gating Central thermal management ? onchip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required ATI CrossFireX? Multi‐GPU Technology Scale up rendering performance and image quality with up to two GPUs             Here's our test system.   Mother Board Foxconn 790GX CPU Phenom II X3 720BE Memory Corsair XMS 6GB Hard Drive Western Digital SE 16 750GB Case Tsunami Thermaltake Display Samsung SyncMaster 30"   Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 with 9.4 ATI Catalyst drivers from ATI 182.50 NForce drivers from Nvidia. AMD is aiming at the 9800 GT with this card so that and the previously popular 9600 GT is what we'll be comparing against. Also keep in mind that our 9800 GT is overclocked like many of Nvidia's cards while our 4770 is not.     We'll start things off with Crysis' GPU Test. We've unfortunately had a few problems with Crysis Warhead. Here we see all cards but the 9600 GT are close and the 4770 and overclocked 9800GT are basically identical giving the 4770 the uppper hand.     Next we'll look at the latest Call of Duty game, World at War. Again we see the 4770 is just below a 4850 however unlike Crysis the Nvidia cards performance is much, much lower. Switching things from Call of Duty, here our 9800 GT appears to perform quite well while our 4770 suffers and our 4850 is on top for a moment. It appears with UT3 prefers stream processors in numbers until you get to such a high resolution that memory bandwidth kicks in.   Left4Dead is Valve's latest game and very popular as with everything they put out. Here we see the 4770 lag behind the 4850 until we hit 2560x1600 where the GDDR5 memory shows it's benefit. The 9800 GT OC and 9600 GT remain slower.   3DMark is synthetic benchmark so I wouldn't put much into it but here's some potential of these graphics cards.   Power consumption was measured from the wall socket directly from the computer. Idle was taken after 5 minutes into the Windows desktop and Load was tested emphasizing gaming performance and the video card in Crysis' GPU demo.   Idle Load ATI Radeon 4770 134W 192W ATI Radeon 4850 144W 215W GeForce 9600 GT 137W 203W GeForce 9800 GT OC 142W 209W For 40nm power consumption is a little higher than we'dlike but still 23W lower at load than a 4850 which it is almost as fast as. Overclocking the card was a breeze with ATI's Catalyst drivers. We maxed them out as far as the Catalyst control panel would allow to 830MHz core and 850MHz memory. While the drivers overclock excellently and it is quite easy to do the problem is it is very conservative! To a fault, the card was running cool and could probably go much higher with this dual slot cooler easily. We wish this would go higher and allow you to truly push things like AMD's Overdrive software. Conclusion: It's frankly amazing what type of performance you can get these days for $100. While ATI expects the cards to be around $109 there should be rebates dropping it to $99. So for $99 you can max out most of the PC games out today up to 1920x1200 and some to 2560x1600 resolution. Clearly not Crysis and a few others but what you can is nothing short of fantastic. As far as the 40nm process we think it's still a little early but it is good to see ATI pushing forward with this and topping out Nvidia again. Overall it seems to offer much better performance for less or similar pricing, with more advanced tech with DX 10.1. Frankly it isn't much more to go for a 4870 at this point which might have longevity but a 4770 is an amazing card for the price and comes with no hesitation of recommendation. Pricing:We don't see the card at e-tailers yet but a Radeon 4850 can be had for $128. Score: 99%  '); //-->

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Tags: blu-ray crossfire ddr3 gddr5 displayport dts geforce gtx275 hd46x0 hd4870 hd4850 hd4890 hdcp hddvd hdmi hd nforce overclocking phenom physics radeon hd4770 tegra vista directx 3dmark