Radeon HD 4770

TI often tries out technological innovations on relatively inexpensive solutions, and the Radeon HD 4770 is no exception to this rule: it uses the RV740, the world's first GPU produced using 40nm manufacturing standards. It is also the first budget video adapter to use GDDR5 memory. From all points of view, the new product promises to be very promising, so in today's review we will try to find out whether the Radeon HD 4770 is really capable of revolutionizing the sector of cheap gaming cards.

Compared to the RV730, the complexity of the RV740 has increased by 312 million transistors. This resulted in doubled computing power (640 ALU versus 320) and the performance of the raster operations subsystem (16 RBE versus 8). At the same time, the new chip with 130 million transistors is simpler than the RV770 core. Taking into account that the core configurations of the Radeon HD 4830 and Radeon HD 4770 are the same (640 ALU, 32 TMU, 16 RBE), we can calculate the theoretical “cost” of two disabled SIMD cores for the first. As it is easy to calculate, 160 ALUs (32 superscalar processors) and 8 texture processors occupy 130 million transistors, and one, respectively, 65 million transistors.

The RV740 and the graphics adapter based on it, the Radeon HD 4770, look both predictable and promising - the first because the new product is, in fact, a Radeon HD 4830 at a new technological level, and the second because, with a core frequency of 750 MHz, this graphics card the adapter should not only outperform the Radeon HD 4830, but also not be too much inferior to its older brother, the Radeon HD 4850.

By using a 40-nm process technology, the chip area was significantly reduced. It's immediately noticeable that the RV740 is noticeably smaller than the RV730, despite the fact that it contains 826 million transistors, 312 million more than the RV730. There is also a similarity - the crystal is mounted in the package at an angle of 45 degrees, and the package itself lacks a protective frame.

adeon HD 4770 boasts very advanced technical characteristics. It includes 128 superscalar computing units of 5 ALUs each (all 640 ALUs, twice as many as the RV670), organized into 8 SIMD cores. Each of these cores, in turn, is served by 4 texture processors, which gives a total of 32 TMUs. The raster operations subsystem is represented by four large processors, the so-called Render Back-Ends (RBE), equivalent to 16 regular ROPs. Thus, from the point of view of the configuration of functional units, the Radeon HD 4770 core is equivalent to the Radeon HD 4830 core, but it operates at a significantly higher frequency - 750 MHz versus 575 MHz, which gives us reason to expect a significantly higher level of gaming performance from the new product. Compared to the Radeon HD 4670, this is a real leap forward.

ATI Radeon HD 4770 Specifications

The Radeon HD 4770 is truly a revolutionary product, as it can offer a superb level of performance that was only available in $200+ solutions a year ago, at a price that barely exceeds $100, and in some cases, even less. In addition, the new ATI graphics adapter is compact, quiet, and energy-efficient, despite its relatively high complexity. GPU. Not least of all, this is due to the 40-nm process technology. In addition to all, it, like all other representatives of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 family, is equipped with advanced multimedia capabilities, including the presence of a full-fledged hardware high-definition video decoder and an integrated HDMI audio core.

One way or another, at present Nvidia has nothing in its arsenal that can be opposed to the Radeon HD 4770: with the GeForce 9800 GT, not to mention the GeForce 9600 GT, it can handle it without much difficulty, and the GeForce GTS 250 belongs to a higher price category, even in the version equipped with 512 MB of local video memory.

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