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img src=http://www.amdzone.com/images/pics/videocards/ati/4830/1.jpg>
ATI have come roaring back this past year with first their 3000 series of
cards and leapfrogged Nvidia in performance and value with the 4000 series of
cards. We've now looked at a number of variations, three alone for the 4800
series but there is at least one more gap to fill for the 4800 series of cards
and this is what ATI and AMD are launching today in the Radeon 4830. Let's take
a look at this new part and what it has to offer.
As you're probably aware the 4870X2 dominates the upper echelon
of graphics cards right now and is a hefty price tag of around
$500, the Radeon 4870 follows at
around
$250-$300 and the $4850 at
$140-$200. The recently launched 4670 came in
at
$79 which is a large gap between the 4850. This is where the 4830 comes in as
a $100-$140 part and in performance targeting more so the 8800 GT series of
cards. This card is AMD's answer to that and fills a product hole the company
had.
The Radeon 4830 uses 512MB of GDDR3
memory as with the 4850, is a single slot card, uses 1x6 pin power connector,
maxes out at 110W, and is PCI-Express 2.0 compliant. Physically the card looks
quite similar to the Radeon HD 4850 with not much to distinguish it. And the
feature set from the 4000 series of cards is all here, second-gen 55nm
manufacturing process, DX 10.1 support, CrossfireX technology, PowerPlay for
energy savings, UVD2 for H.264 decoding, 7.1 audio output over HDMI.
Here are the specs on the various Radeon 4800 cards.
| |
Radeon 4830 |
Radeon 4850 |
Radeon 4870 |
| Engine Clock |
575MHz |
625MHz |
750MHz |
| Stream Processors |
640 |
800 |
800 |
| Computer Power |
740GLOPs |
1.0 TFLOPs |
1.2 TFLOPs |
| Texture Units |
32 TMUs |
40 TMUs |
40 TMUs |
| Memory Bandwidth |
57.6 GB/s |
64 GB/s |
115 GB/s |
| Max Board Power |
110W |
110W |
160W |
As you can see they scaled back the clock and removed some
stream processors for the Radeon 4830 to hit.
Here are the full technical specs.
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x 16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3 memory interface
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 and constant caches
Up to 160 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 anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved 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 2.1 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 Blu-ray 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 MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
Avivo Video Post Processor1
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
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)
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 dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit 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 30-bit 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, DTS, enabling a plug-and-play audio
solution over HDMI5
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
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 Technology7
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel bridge interconnect8
Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit SP1 with ATI Catalyst 8.10
beta drivers and Forceware 178.24.
In Crysis the Radeon 4830 comes in under the wire just ahead of
the GeForce 8800 GT.
Unreal 3 shows a steep drop off for the 8800 GT at 2560x1600.
Here in Company of Heroes the card trades off with the GeForce
8800 GT as it takes the lead in Relic's DX10 RTS.
World in Conflict shows similar results with the 4830 just being
edged out by the 4830.
3DMark as well it's close but not able to keep up.
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 |
| AMD Radeon 4830 |
120W |
135W |
| Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT |
215W |
235W |
The Radeon 4450 power consumption is much lower than the
4670 we recently looked at whether idle or under load. This means it should
be a much better card for an HTPC as long as gaming performance isn't that
important to you.
The temperature of the card was measured at 55 degrees Celsius idle and 87
after a full load. Again the 4800 cards get quite hot but at last ATI has added
a tool to control the fanspeed.
Overclocking the board was fairly easy with ATI's drivers, hitting 650MHz for
the core and 1GHz for the memory with ease.
Conclusion: The AMD Radeon 4830 is probably the
least exciting of the 4800 cards being the lowest-end of the 4800 series.
That said is still a very solid card and somewhat comparable to a GeForce
8800 or 9800 GT though the two seem to trade off at times. But ATI has lower
power consumption and DX 10.1 support which is a bonus. This one isn't quite
as clear though as others as a GeForce 9800 GT is a little cheaper than a
Radeon 4830. You can pick up a GeForce 9800 GT for $100 after rebate.
However, immediately at launch you can get a Radeon 4830 for $120 after
rebate. This shows that there's probably some room to go down which these
cards go down. $120 is still a fantastic value but under $100 for a card
like the Radeon 4830 is just fantastic for the sub-$100 market and graphics
technology. Congrats to ATI, they've filled out their product line nicely.
There's still the hole between a $300 1GB Radeon 4870 and the $450 4870 X2,
hopefully there might be some room to work in another card there soon. Also,
the 4800 series of cards have now been out for four months, I'm hoping ATI
has something else up it's sleeve in the next few months.
Pricing: The Radeon 4830 is
launched right now with the cheapest price of $120. A GeForce 9800 GT can be
had from MWave for
$135. Score: 90%
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