ATI Radeon HD 4770 40nm GPU, $99 Graphics Return


Our Test System and 3DMark Vantage

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.


Tags:  AMD, ATI, Radeon, Gaming, graphics, GPU

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