ATI continues to pump out new graphics cards based on the 4000 series. It was only a little over a week ago that the 4670 was revealed and today we have a new card to look at, AMD's Radeon HD 4550. This one is targeting a market quite a bit under even the $79 MSRP of the Radeon 4670. Looks take a look at AMD's latest budget card and see how it stacks up.

As with all other 4000 series cards the previous features are maintained: DirectX 10.1 support, UDV2 for H.264 decoding. 7.1 sound over HDMI, second generation 55nm process, AMD's AVIVO technology, PCI-Express 2.0, CrossfireX technology, easy DVI-to-HDMI technology for HTPCs. The big feature set is all here.
 

The technology is a cut down though as they are targeting a mainstream market with this. 80 stream processor units are featured here, compare that to the 320 of the Radeon HD 4670. These 80 stream processor units run at 600MHz and the card comes with either 512MB or 256MB of DDR3 memory running at 800MHz for 1.6Gbps of memory data rate and a max bandwidth of 12.8GB/sec. The card uses 242 million transistors with the second gen 55nm process.

ATI's PowerPlay is also here and AMD claims the card uses less than 25 watts under a full load which is great for a good general use video card.

A wide variety of the usual partners are onboard for the card including Visiontek, HIS, Palit, Asus, PowerColor, GeCube, Diamond, Sapphire, MSI, Gigabyte, and Club3D.

Here's a comparison of the 4550, 3450, and Nvidia's 9400 GT.

Here are the full technical specs.

242 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
80 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 32 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
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 12x 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)
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 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform1
2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)
Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
Dual stream playback (or Picture-in-picture)
Hardware MPEG-1 and DivX video decode acceleration
Motion compensation and IDCT
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor1
Enhanced DVD up-conversion to HD
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
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 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated DVI display outputs
Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)2
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
DisplayPort™ output support
Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 KHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution4
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10802
Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 KHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution4
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™ Technology5
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
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 – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology6
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
 

The fact that this is a mainstream card comes clearly into focus when trying to run Crysis' GPU test. Still the 17.3fps the card scores at 1280x1024 on medium settings is more than twice the 8.1 the 3450 scores. The 4670 does great as does the 9600 GT.

Unreal Tournament 3 is a lot more playable on the 4550 though it comes in just a hair faster than the Radeon HD 3450.

In World in Conflict the 4550 holds up decently at 1280x1024 though far behind a Radeon HD 3650 from the previous generation.

In Company of Heroes the Radeon 4450 is trounced not playable at just medium settings though again beating a 3450.

3DMark basically puts the 4450 in it's place, a little better than the 3450 and much better than most integrated graphics.

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.