Today AMD's new Radeon cards HD 4670 and HD 4650 enter the competition of the mainstream graphics cards and the RV730 has to demonstrate its capabilities.
[Source: view picture gallery]
With the RV730 AMD continues the "Transitioning" strategy. PCGH checks if their plan is successful. We compared the HD 4670 with several other cards of the same price range - it is said to cost about €70 - and added some more expensive chips to visualize the overall market position.
Radeon HD 4670 [Source: view picture gallery]
It is commonly known that the HD 4670 is, with its 320 ALUs and regardless of the only 128 bit wide interface, faster than the direct predecessor HD 3650. The comparison with other GPUs available for €70 (or even less), is more interesting. A HD 3850, which is available with 512 MiByte in this price sector, unfortunately is not part of our review, because we only have cards with 256 MiByte at the moment.
[Source: view picture gallery]
The RV730 and therefore the HD 4670/4650 is the third model that has 320 Shader units.
| Transition | HD 4670 | HD 3870 | HD 2900 |
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| | | | |
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| Chip | RV730 | RV670 | R600 |
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| Die-Size (mm2) | 150 | 202 | 429 |
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| Process (Nanometer) | 55 | 55 | 80 |
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| Transistoren (Mio.) | 514 | 666 | 720 |
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| Taktrate Chipkern (MHz) | 750 | 775 | 742 |
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| Shader-ALUs (VS/PS) | 320 | 320 | 320 |
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| GFLOP/s | 480 | 496 | 474,9 |
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| Texture-Units | 32 | 16 | 16 |
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| Texturefill (MTex/s) | 24.000 | 12.400 | 11.872 |
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| ROPs/RBEs | 8 | 16 | 16 |
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| Pixelfill (MPix/s) | 6.000 | 12.400 | 11.872 |
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| VRAM (MiByte) | 512 | 512/1.024 | 512/1.024 |
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| RAM-Typ | GDDR3 | GDDR4 | GDDR3/4 |
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| Buswidth VRAM (Bits) | 128 | 256 | 512 |
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| Taktrate VRAM (MHz) | 1.000 | 1.125 | 999 |
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| Bandwidth (GiByte/s) | 32 | 72 | 127,8 |
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| Positioning | Mainstream | Performance | Enthusiast |
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| Launch | 09/2008 | 11/2007 | 05/2007 |
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The memory interface shrunk to a quarter of its former size, but the number of TLUs was doubled and DX 10.1 support was integrated. Most impressive is the reduction of the Die size from once 429 mm² of the R600 to only 150 mm² of the RV730. That's about the size of the RV530 that was used with on the X1600 series.
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