Official Site Bumtion Network: The Subject Of ATI Radeon HD 4770

Sunday, June 28, 2009

The Subject Of ATI Radeon HD 4770

Posted by Bumtion Network

At the heart of the card is a 750 MHz RV740 core that features low power consumption (AMD claimed it’s around 80W) and also lower heat properties, thanks to its 40nm architecture. Besides Direct X 10.1 support, the card also features UVD 2.0 video engine, HDMI output support with built-in HD audio controller, and also supports for CrossFireX Multi-GPU configuration.

In terms of memory, the card contains 512MB of GDDR5 memory running on a 128-bit bus at a speed of 800 MHz (3.2 GHz effective speed). While the bus width might be narrow, this card still managed to churn out an impressive amount of peak bandwidth of 51.2GB/s thanks to the RAM’s blazing speed.

The top part of the card is covered by heatsink, heatpipes and a cooling fan but still, the card felt pretty light. The card has two DVI and one S-Video output port. Last but not least, the power for this card comes through only one 6-pin auxiliary power connector which further showed the card’s low power property.

Do bear in mind that the the ATI Radeon HD 4770 that we have here is actually a reference board, so the retail version might look different.

As you can see, we are using a very high end system, equipped with the latest and fastest Phenom II processor from AMD together with a Gigabyte motherboard. Although our OCZ RAM is listed as 4GB, due to limitation of the 32-bit edition of Windows Vista, only 3.25GB is available to the system. We also installed the latest version of ATI Catalyst for this test.

To test the performances of the card, we choose retail edition of Race Driver GRID and Red Alert 3. Statistics from these two games were recorded using manual benchmarking application in FRAPS 2.9.8.

We also ran couple of purpose-built benchmark tools such as Street Fighter IV Benchmark Tools and Techland’s Call of Juarez DirectX 10 benchmark. To complete it all, 3DMark Vantage provides us 3DMark score that many of enthuasists outhere have a love and hate relationship with.

TEST RESULTS

3DMark Vantage Test

Test Preset: Performance and Entry
Score legend: P for Performance, E for Entry

Due to the lack HD-capable display at our office, we only able to run two preset configurations since 3D Mark Vantage presets are depending on display monitor’s resolution support.

Race Driver GRID

Graphic Settings: Maxed Out on 1280 X 1024 resolution
Top - bottom image: Demolition Derby, Pro Tuned

The reason we chose the modes above are because of its chaotic nature where a lot of actions going on. Also, the two circuits represent daytime and nighttime.

Red Alert 3

Graphic Settings: Maxed Out at 1280 x 1024 resolution

30 fps is quite low compared to framerate that we received in GRID. This is because the framerate has been locked by EA at 30 fps. That being said, the card showed no problem to run the game at the maximum framerate at a constant rate.

Street Fighter IV Benchmark Tool

Graphic Settings: Maxed Out at 1280 x 1024 resolution with Parallel Rendering Off

While the card passed the SFIV Benchmark Tool with flying results, the FPS might drop to under 30 fps during intense battle, as seen in the screenshot. But somehow it rarely happened and pretty much unnoticeable. We turned off Parallel Rendering in this test as it is meant for multi-core cards.

Call of Juarez Direct X10 Benchmark

Graphic Setting: Maxed Out at 1280 x 1024 resolution
Upper - lower screenshots (L to R results): 4xMSAA and 2xSSAA

The reason why we ran two different anti-aliasing settings is because as shown by the screenshots, both techniques churned out different results.

CONCLUSION

To our delight, the card managed to perform way better than expected, providing constant framerate and processing power to all graphic intense application that we threw at it. For such a huge power, it is almost unbelievable that the card only cost around RM 400. Considering that the price of this card will fall over time, it is only a matter of time before it becomes even more affordable and more accessible to mainstream users out there.