AMD is launching yet another new ATI Radeon graphics card today. And in light of the current worldwide economic conditions, along with the performance and power consumption data we'll be presenting you on the proceeding pages, we suspect it's going to be a welcomed addition to the company's already potent graphics card line-up.

You see, the brand new Radeon HD 4770 is AMD's first mainstream desktop GPU manufactured using a 40nm process, and as such, it is more economical for the company to produce (with a smaller die size) and it consumes little power relative to the current crop of products manufactured at 55nm. The Radeon HD 4770's main features don't stray far from the other members of the Radeon HD 4000 family, but its specifications are somewhat different due to the use of a new GPU, which was formerly codenamed RV740.

Now then, what if we told you this new lower power GPU also drops in at a miserly $99 price point?  Are the days of the reasonably powerful $99 graphics card back, you ask?  We'll answer that question for you in the pages ahead but in the mean time, the Radeon HD 4770's main features and benefits are listed below for those of you who like to see all of the gritty details. We'll discuss the card itself and its overall performance a little later. Take a look...

ATI Radeon HD 4770

  
ATI Radeon HD 4770 Technical Details and Product Matrix

As the slides above show, the new $99 Radeon HD 4770 falls somewhere in between the Radeon HD 4670 and Radeon HD 4850 in AMD's current product line-up. The 40nm RV740 GPU at the heart of the card consists of 826M transistors and its reference specifications call for a 750MHz GPU clock. The GPU is outfitted with 640 stream processors, 32 texture units, and 16 ROPs and it is linked to its 512MB GDDR5 frame buffer through a 128-bit interface running at 800MHz. At its reference clock speeds, the Radeon HD 4770 offers peak texture and pixel fillrates of 24GTexel/s and 12GPixel/s, respectively, with 51.2GB/s of memory bandwidth. Maximum board power is rated at 80W, which puts it just over the limit of a PCI Express x16 graphics slot, hence the card requires a single 6-pin PCI Express supplemental power connector.  Let's drop down to have a closer look next.

The Radeon HD 4770 looks much like the current crop of Radeon HD 4000 series cards, thanks to its red PCB and ATI-branded cooling the solution.

    

    
Reference ATI Radeon HD 4770

Like the other members of the Radeon HD 4000 family, the new 4770 features a pair of dual-link DVI outputs with an HDTV output nestled in between. Digitla audio can also be passed through to an HDTV through the use of a compatible DVI-to-HDMI adapter dongle.

The Radeon HD 4770's PCB is markedly shorter than Radeon HD 4800 series cards, so it should have no trouble fitting into any standard case. And like other Radeons it is equipped with a pair of CrossFire edge connectors for multi-GPU operation. The cooling solution used on the card is two-slots wide and exhausts hot-air from the system through vents in its case bracket. It consists of a heatsink with copper heat-pipes that rests atop the GPU and a barrel-type fan which sucks air in at the rear of the card and expels it from the front. There is also a reinforcement bar on our reference Radeon HD 4770 that run along the top edge of the PCB. It's not a necessity, however, as the card and cooler is relatively light in comparison to most other dual-slot graphics cards.

    

   
Asus EAH4770 With Custom Cooler

Custom Radeon HD 4770 cards are also planned by a few of AMD's board partners, as is evident by the Asus EAH4770 you see pictured here. The Asus EAH4770 uses a similar PCB design at the reference card, but with a custom cooling solution. The GPU cooler used on the Asus EAH4770 sits right on top of the GPU with a large cooling fan dead-center. While not completely silent, we found the EAH4770's custom cooler to be very quiet and it did its job quite well, with idle and load GPU temps hovering between 40'C and 75'C. It doesn't, however, exhaust hot air from the case.

Asus will be shipping the EAH4770 with a basic array of accessories. Included with the card, we found an HD component output dongle, a DVI-to-HDMI adapter, a DVI-to-VGA adapter, a dual-Molex to PCI Express 6-pin power adapter, a quick setup guide, and of course driver and utility discs.

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Gigabyte GA-EX58 Extreme motherboard powered by a Core i7 920 quad-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS, and installed the latest DX10 redist and various hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications.

HotHardware's Test Systems Core i7 Powered

Hardware Used: Core i7 920 (2.66GHz) Gigabyte EX58-Extreme (X58 Express Chipset) Radeon HD 4890 OC (EAH4890 TOP) Radeon HD 4890 (EAH4890) Radeon HD 4870 1GB GeForce GTX 285 GeForce GTX 275 GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 6GB OCZ DDR3-1066 C7 (3 X 2GB) Integrated Audio Integrated Network Western Digital "Raptor" 150GB (10,000RPM - SATA)

Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 DirectX March 2009 Redist ATI Catalyst v9.3b NVIDIA GeForce Drive v185.63 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark Vantage v1.0.1 FarCry 2 Crysis* Left 4 Dead* Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.5* * - Custom benchmark

Futuremark 3DMark Vantage Synthetic DirectX Gaming

3DMark Vantage

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which y isn't available on previous versions of Windows.  3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though.  With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware.  We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Performance preset option, which uses a resolution of 1280x1024 no anti-aliasing and trilinear filtering.

The Radeon HD 4770 perform quite well in 3DMark Vantage. The card hung right alongside the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ and pulled slightly ahead of the GeForce 9800 GT.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars OpenGL Gaming Performance

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is Based on a radically enhanced version of id's Doom 3 engine and viewed by many as Battlefield 2 meets the Strogg, and then some.  In fact, we'd venture to say that id took EA's team-based warfare genre up a notch or two.  ET: Quake Wars also marks the introduction of John Carmack's "Megatexture" technology that employs large environment and terrain textures that cover vast areas of maps without the need to repeat and tile many smaller textures.  The beauty of megatexture technology is that each unit only takes up a maximum of 8MB of frame buffer memory.  Add to that HDR-like bloom lighting and leading edge shadowing effects and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks great, plays well and works high end graphics cards vigorously.  The game was tested with all of its in-game options set to their maximum values with soft particles enabled in addition to 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.

Although the numbers in the graph are quite different, the benchmark results from our custom Enemy Territory: Quake wars tests look much like those from 3DMark on the previous page. Here, the Radeon HD 4770 once again hangs with the more expensive Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+ and outpaced the GeForce 9800 GT.

Crysis v1.21 DirectX 10 Gaming Performance

Crysis

If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player, FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine produces some stunning visuals that are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the PC to date.  The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet.  In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is a beast of a game.  We ran the full game patched to v1.21 with all of its visual options set to 'Very High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested  A custom demo recorded on the Ice level was used throughout testing.

Crysis absolutely crushes all of the cards at the high-quality settings we used for testing, but the overall performance trend remains the same. The Radeon HD 4770 slides in just behind the 4850 and 9800 GTX+, but just ahead of the GeForce 9800 GT.

FarCry 2 DirectX Gaming Performance

FarCry 2

Like the original, FarCry 2 is one of the more visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date.  Courtesy of the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft, FarCry 2's game-play is enhanced by advanced environment physics, destructible terrain, high resolution textures, complex shaders, realistic dynamic lighting, and motion-captured animations.  We benchmarked the graphics cards in this article with a fully patched version of FarCry 2, using one of the built-in demo runs recorded in the "Ranch" map.  The test results shown here were run at various resolutions with 4X AA and No anisotropic enabled concurrently.

The smaller 512MB frame buffers on the Radeon HD 4770, HD 4850, and GeForce 9800 GT really come into play with the high-quality settings we used for testing in FarCry 2. In this test, the Radeon HD 4770 trails all of the other cards, including the GeForce 9800 GT.

Left 4 Dead DirectX Gaming Performance

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by Valve part-way into development. Like Half Life 2, the game uses the Source engine, however, the visual in L4D are far superior to anything seen in the Half Life universe to date. The game pits four Survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic against hordes of aggressive zombies. We tested the game at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled and all in game graphical options set to their maximum values.

The Radeon HD 4770 performed well in our custom Left 4 Dead benchmark, but couldn't quite keep pace with competing offerings from NVIDIA. Here, the Radeon HD 4770 finished a few frames per second behind the GeForce 9800 GT--the other higher-end cards obviously pulled away by larger margins.

We'd like to cover a few final data points before bringing this article to a close. Throughout all of our benchmarking and testing, we monitored how much power our test systems were consuming using a power meter. Our goal was to give you an idea as to how much power each configuration used while idling and under a heavy workload. Please keep in mind that we were testing total system power consumption at the outlet here, not just the power being drawn by the motherboards alone.

Total System Power Consumption Tested at the Outlet

Using a 40nm process to manufacture the Radeon HD 4770 seems to have really paid off in regard to its power consumption characteristics, at least when the card is running at its reference specifications. In our power consumptions tests, the new Radeon HD 4770 consumed the least amount of power at both idle and under load. What's most impressive is the comparison between the 4850 and 4770--although both cards offer somewhat similar performance depending on the game / settings being used, the Radeon HD 4770 consumes significantly less power under load.

With power consumption this low, it should come as no surprise that the Radeon HD 4770 is a fairly quiet card to operate. Under idle conditions, the Radeon HD 4770 is inaudible over the noise produced by the average CPU cooler and PSU. And under load, the card's fan barely spins up at all. We did have one strange occurrence during our 3DMark Vantage testing where the Radeon HD 4770's fan spun up to full speed and was quite loud, but it happened only once, lasted for only a moment and never happened again.

Performance Summary: The Radeon HD 4770 performed very well throughout out entire battery of tests. Generally speaking, the Radeon HD 4770 offers performance a step above NVIDIA's similarly priced GeForce 9800 GT in most games and a notch behind the more expensive Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+.

There is a lot to like about the new Radeon HD 4770. With its expected street price of about $109, which will be brought down further to $99 through mail in rebates, the Radeon HD 4770 offers excellent bang for the buck. In fact, the Radeon HD 4770 offers performance in the same range as cards that were launched at the $299 - $349 price point only a year ago. That's progress. We also found the Radeon HD 4770 to be relatively quiet and found its power consumption to be quite low in comparison to other cards in its class. That means not only is the Radeon HD 4770 competitively priced right from the get go, but it's also a lower cost alternative over the long haul, thanks to its low power consumption. The 40nm RV740 GPU employed on the card should be economical for AMD to produce as well, which should make the Radeon HD 4770 a win-win for consumers and AMD alike.

In the end, the Radeon HD 4770 is one of the best buys at its expected price point currently. Performance is strong in light of competing offerings, the price is right, and the card is cheaper to operate over time than anything else in its class. Anyone in the market for a new graphics card priced around a hundred bucks should definitely consider the new AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770.

Update: It appears Radeon HD 4770 cards have already been listed at NewEgg. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any $10 mail in rebates available with the cards, as AMD had suggested.

Update #2: Three of the four cards in stock at NewEgg are now listed with the $10 mail in rebates.

Low power Competitive price DirectX 10.1 support Smallish PCB Quiet cooler	We'd prefer lower street prices, over rebates