Last week, due to some unexpected circumstances, we were able to post a sneak peek of the RV770 GPU and ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card. As our limited testing showed, the Radeon HD 4850 was quite promising for a $199 graphics card. But we weren't able to tell the complete story. While the initial benchmarks definitely looked good, there was a lot more to talk about in regard to the Radeon HD 4850 and the RV770 GPU at the heart of the card.
Today we can finally spill the rest of the beans. You see, AMD didn't plan to officially announce just one new Radeon HD 4800 series card this week, but two, with a dash of information about a third thrown in for good measure. Today marks the official arrival of not only the Radeon HD 4850, but the higher-end Radeon HD 4870 as well. As we've already explained, one card - the Radeon HD 4850 - is targeted at the sub-$200 price point. The other, however, is a $299 screamer that makes use of some cutting edge technology, like GDDR5 memory.
We'll get down to the nitty gritty just a little later. For now, check out the list of features and specifications below and strap in for an exciting ride. What we have in store, may surprise some of you...
ATI Radeon HD 4850 (RV770)
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AMD ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series |
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Specifications and Features | |
- 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
- PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
- 256-bit GDDR3/GDDR5 memory interface
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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
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Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
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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
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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
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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
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ATI PowerPlay
- Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
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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
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ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform
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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)
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Hardware MPEG-1, and DivX video decode acceleration
- Motion compensation and IDCT
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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
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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
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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
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Two integrated 400MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
- Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363
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DisplayPort output support
- Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16003
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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
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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
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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 4800 series has much in common with the Radeon HD 3800 series. Both offer DX10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support, both series of GPUs are manufactured on TSMC's 55nm process node, and both support ATI's CrossFireX multi-GPU technology.
Because we've covered many of the shared features of the Radeon HD 4800 and 3800 series cards before, we won't be going in depth again here. However, we would recommend taking a look at a few recent articles to brush up on the tech if you're so inclined.
Perusing the sampling of articles above will lay the groundwork for much of what we'll be showing you on the pages ahead. | |
