| ATI Radeon 4770 |
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| Written by Jeff_Tom | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Monday, 27 April 2009 23:24 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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.
Here are the full technical specs.
Feature Summary
Here's our test system.
Our test system OS was Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 with 9.4 ATI Catalyst drivers from ATI 182.50 NForce drivers from Nvidia. AMD is aiming at the 9800 GT with this card so that and the previously popular 9600 GT is what we'll be comparing against. Also keep in mind that our 9800 GT is overclocked like many of Nvidia's cards while our 4770 is not.
We'll start things off with Crysis' GPU Test. We've unfortunately had a few problems with Crysis Warhead. Here we see all cards but the 9600 GT are close and the 4770 and overclocked 9800GT are basically identical giving the 4770 the uppper hand.
Next we'll look at the latest Call of Duty game, World at War. Again we see the 4770 is just below a 4850 however unlike Crysis the Nvidia cards performance is much, much lower.
Switching things from Call of Duty, here our 9800 GT appears to perform quite well while our 4770 suffers and our 4850 is on top for a moment. It appears with UT3 prefers stream processors in numbers until you get to such a high resolution that memory bandwidth kicks in.
Left4Dead is Valve's latest game and very popular as with everything they put out. Here we see the 4770 lag behind the 4850 until we hit 2560x1600 where the GDDR5 memory shows it's benefit. The 9800 GT OC and 9600 GT remain slower.
3DMark is synthetic benchmark so I wouldn't put much into it but here's some potential of these graphics cards.
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.
For 40nm power consumption is a little higher than we'dlike but still 23W lower at load than a 4850 which it is almost as fast as. Overclocking the card was a breeze with ATI's Catalyst drivers. We maxed them out as far as the Catalyst control panel would allow to 830MHz core and 850MHz memory. While the drivers overclock excellently and it is quite easy to do the problem is it is very conservative! To a fault, the card was running cool and could probably go much higher with this dual slot cooler easily. We wish this would go higher and allow you to truly push things like AMD's Overdrive software.
Conclusion: It's frankly amazing what type of performance you can get these days for $100. While ATI expects the cards to be around $109 there should be rebates dropping it to $99. So for $99 you can max out most of the PC games out today up to 1920x1200 and some to 2560x1600 resolution. Clearly not Crysis and a few others but what you can is nothing short of fantastic. As far as the 40nm process we think it's still a little early but it is good to see ATI pushing forward with this and topping out Nvidia again. Overall it seems to offer much better performance for less or similar pricing, with more advanced tech with DX 10.1. Frankly it isn't much more to go for a 4870 at this point which might have longevity but a 4770 is an amazing card for the price and comes with no hesitation of recommendation. Pricing: We don't see the card at e-tailers yet but a Radeon 4850 can be had for $128. Score: 99%
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