ATI has come back in ways many didn't think possible at one point for the graphic company. Although leapfrogging had long been a part of the graphics card business dominated by ATI and Nvidia since 2000 it looked quite bad for ATI with no DX10 part and then one that launched that was slow and power hungry. That was this and this is now as ATI now is on top in every single aspect with their newest 4000 series of cards. Today we'll be looking again at their latest graphics card targeted at the sub-$100 market, the Radeon HD 4670 from Sapphire.

The Radeon 4670 shares a lot in common with the other 4800 cards that have been on the market. It is built off a more efficient second generation 55nm manufacturing process, it features UVD2 HD decoding, PCI-Express 2.0 support, HDMI 7.1 audio output. The feature set is basically identical but the number of stream processors and power is more similar to the Radeon 3800 series.

320 stream processors are onboard the 4670, the same as the Radeon 3850 and 3870. The GPU is clocked at 750MHz which is 25MHz less than the 3870 with 512MB of GDDR3 memory at 1GHz (2GHz data rate) or cards with 1GB of memory at 900MHz (1.8GHz effective). This is slower than the 1.25GHz of the 3870 and the 4670 also sees a chopping of the bus bandwidth down to 128-bit compared to the 256-bit of the 3870. Still we see specs very similar to a 3870 and for an $80 card with newer features and no need for external power. Two dual-link DVI outputs are onboard as well as the standard component out.

The Sapphire card we're looking at is a standard card but Sapphire does offer a lot of value in an excellent bundle. Sapphire includes Cyberlink DVD suite, Cyberlink PowerDVD 7 for Blu-Ray playback, DVI-to-VGA adapter, HDTV dongle, and a DVI-to-HDMI adapter. Sapphire also includes what they call a RubyROM which includes demos of Call of Juarez, John Woo's Stranglehold, Dungeon Runners, the screensaver Earthsim, GameShadow, wallpapers and other screensavers. No full versions of games but a great software bundle for a card in this price range.

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. Here we see that unfortunately Crossfire is not supported for the 4670 cards at least in the driver revision have. Hopefully those are updated soon.

UT3 shows different results with Crossfire and tops all other cards including the 9600 GT. When optimized the 4670 cards definitely seem to be formidable in Crossfire.

World in Conflict though shows the same pattern as Crysis with no Crossfire support at least in this earlier driver stage. Again that will probably change soon. A 4670 does perform quit well on it's own.

Company of Heroes shifts back to Crossfire support and shows how strongly the card can perform.

In 3DMark is synthetic but here Crossfire is fully supported and the cards score almost 13,000 together.

These tests were from our earlier AMD 4670 review which mirrors our results with this Sapphire 4670.

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.