AMD has been able to top Nvidia throughout the mid-range to high-end product markets with their Radeon 4800 series of cards topping Nvidia's best from the 4850 to the 4870 X2. Only with drastic price cuts have Nvidia remained competitive from what their GTX 260, 280, and 9800 GTX debuted at originally. Nvidia recently delved into the mid-range line of graphics cards with their new cards but ATI until now has yet to. Today we have a brand new 4000 series card to look at aimed at the sub-$100 market which as you'll see performs quite excellently. Let's take a look at AMD's Radeon HD 4670.

Here we see the new display port connectors featured on the 4670 which look quite a bit like SATA connectors.

The Radeon 4670 is similar in feature as with the other 4000 series cards with UVD2 for HD decoding, DX 10.1 support, 55nm second gen manufacturing process, integrated HD audio on HDMI and DisplayPort, CrossfireX, PCI-Express 2.0 are all here as they were with the 4850 and 4870 video cards.

Hynix memory is featured on the card.

Looking at the specs of the card it is actually quite similar to the Radeon 3800 cards which were ATI's best in the previous generation. The Radeon HD 4670 features an engine clock speed of 750MHz and 1GHz (2GHz effective) for the 512MB GDDR3 version and 1GB for the 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) version. Both feature two dual-link DVI output and TV output and consume under 75W. The Radeon 4650 features an engine clock speed of 600MHz and a memory speed of 500Hz with 512MB of DDR2 but we did not have one to test today.

So not much new technically but a stripped down version of the 4800s basically with the same amount of stream processors as the 3870 and 3850.

Here are the technical specs.

514 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 memory interface (depending on model)
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
320 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 and constant caches
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)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for superior stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4 or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for superior quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)

Starting things off with Crysis we see the 4670 perform quite well at 39.1fps. Not as fast as the 3870 but still rather close and 13fps more than a GeForce 9500 GT.

UT3 is a very popular engine and here again the 4670 does quite a good job and follows the results from earlier. A GeForce 9600 GT is able to top all of these cards though but for $80 this card does a fantastic job.

In Call of Duty 4 AMD shines particularly well and we see again the 4670 do a great job.

Again the 4670 beats a 3850 but comes up short of the 3870 this time in Massive Entertainment's World in Conflict.

Company of Heroes isn't much different.

In 3DMark however the 3850 comes out ahead of the 4670 but it is a synthetic benchmark.

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.