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.

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.