AMD is looking to tap into the graphics card market’s $100 sweet spot with the announcement of the ATI Radeon HD 4770. This comes after the introduction of the range-topping Radeon HD 4890 earlier this month, but the new GPU should reach a wider market thanks to the affordable price point.
Built using a new 40-nanometer manufacturing process that packs 826 million transistors onto the chip, the Radeon HD 4770 GPU sports a 750MHz engine clock, 640 stream processors, an 800MHz memory clock, and support for GDDR5 memory. The 40nm process used on the RV740 GPU brings down total power consumption to a maximum of around 80Watts, but varies via the Dynamic Power Management feature that automatically lowers the power draw during light graphics loads.
The HD 4770 falls at the low-end of the HD 4000 series’ performance line–right between the HD 4830 and the mainstream HD 4600 series in terms of price and performance. As part of the Radeon HD 4000 series, the HD 4770 also features the line’s key features, including hardware-based HD-transcoding, HDMI and 7.1 audio support, DirectX 10.1 support, ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology, and support for the PCI Express 2.0 interface.
Besides its power-efficiency, gamers should appreciate this GPU’s other key feature: support for DirectX 10.1 games. Thanks to the significant performance gain of DX10.1 over DirectX10, this card should give gamers a pretty nice “bang” for their hundred bucks. The ATI Radeon HD 4770 is listed to sell within the $99-$109 price point.
