ATI Radeon HD 4830 Mainstream GPU

Thursday, October 23, 2008 - by Marco Chiappetta in Video


Since the RV770 GPU's initial arrival, we have seen the technology used in the GPU migrate up and down AMD's product stack. At first, the RV770 powered only the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870, but soon thereafter two RV770's were linked together to form the current flagship Radeon HD 4870 X2.  Then the GPU was scaled down to bring out the Radeon HD 4600, 4500, and 4300 series of products. Ultimately, AMD ended up with competitive offerings at virtually every price point, ranging from $39 on up, to over $550 for the flagship product. But there is an approximate $80 price gap between the $160-ish Radeon HD 4850 and the roughly $80 Radeon HD 4670, that AMD plans to fill today with the release of the Radeon HD 4830.

As its name suggests, this latest addition to the Radeon HD 4800 series is similar to the Radeon HD 4850. In fact, the reference designs look almost identical. The 4830 however, has had a couple of SIMD arrays disabled, and hence has fewer active stream processors and TMUs.  We'll show you what other differences there are a little later.  For now, check out the specs and other related information.  We'll get on with the show right afterwards...


ATI Radeon HD 4830
AMD ATI Radeon HD 4830
Specifications and Features

  • 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
  • PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
  • 256-bit GDDR3/GDDR5 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
    • 800 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, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, 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 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 2.0 support

 ATI PowerPlay

  • 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 Avivo HD Video and Display Platform

  • 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 Processor
    • New enhanced DVD upconversion to HD new!
    • New automatic and dynamic contrast adjustment new!
    • 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
    • Full score in HQV (SD) and HQV (HD) video quality benchmarks
  • 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)
    • Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)3
    • Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content4
  • Two integrated 400MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
    • Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363
  • DisplayPort output support
    • Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16003
  • HDMI output support
    • Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10803
    • 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 solution
  • Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder
    • Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
    • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
    • Underscan and overscan compensation
    • MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
    • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
    • VGA mode support on all display outputs
  • ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology
    • Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs
    • Integrated compositing engine
    • High performance dual channel bridge interconnect
As the above list of specifications and features show, the new Radeon HD 4830 has essentially the exact same features as the other cards in the Radeon HD 4800 series.  The Radeon HD 4830 offers DX10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support, AVIVO HD, HDMI with audio, etc.  These GPUs are manufactured on TSMC's 55nm process node and the cards support ATI's CrossFireX multi-GPU technology.

Since we've covered essentially all of the shared features of the Radeon HD 4800 series cards before, we won't go into them in depth again here.  However, we would recommend taking a look at a few of our recent articles to brush up on the tech, if you're so inclined.

Reading the articles above will lay the groundwork for much of what we'll be showing you on the pages ahead.  Because the new Radeon HD 4830 shares the same GPU as the other cards in the Radeon HD 4800 series, with some elements disabled, they have the same feature set and capabilities but differentiate in terms of performance.
 

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Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, GPU, Stream

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