ATI Radeon HD 4550 Budget DX10.1 GPU
Our Test Systems and 3DMark06
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEMS: We tested all of the graphics cards used in this article on either an Asus nForce 790i SLI Ultra based Striker II Extreme motherboard (NVIDIA GPUs) or an X48 based Asus P5E3 Premium (ATI GPUs) powered by a Core 2 Extreme QX6850 quad-core processor and 2GB of low-latency Corsair RAM. The first thing we did when configuring these test systems was enter their respective BIOSes 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 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.
|
|
|
|
Asus Striker II Extreme Asus P5E3 Premium Radeon HD 4550 Integrated Audio |
Relevant Software: Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 DirectX June 2008 Redist NVIDIA Forceware v177.92 / v177.39 |
|
|
|
|
|
3DMark06 is a synthetic benchmark, designed to simulate DX9-class game titles. This version differs from the earlier 3Dmark05 in a number of ways, and includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups that number to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well. |
3DMark06's default benchmark puts the new Radeon HD 4550 behind all of the other cards we tested here. We should note, AMD is positioning the card against NVIDIA's GeForce 9400 GT, which we unfortunately did not have available for testing in time for this article. The GeForce 9500 GT 512MB DDR2 card, however, is available for under $50 after mail-in-rebate, which puts it right in the same price bracket as the 512MB, passively cooled Radeon HD 4550 we tested here.
As we tunnel deeper into 3DMark06's individual shader model tests, the Radeon HD 4550's position amongst the other cards we used for reference does not change.
