AMD introduces ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series graphics cards

Today AMD has announced the ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series of mainstream graphics cards priced at well under $100. These are described as being able to deliver exceptional gaming and HD multimedia performance while consuming less power than a standard light bulb.

Radeon HD 4600 image gallery!

To cards have been announced today:

• ATI Radeon HD 4670 - 512 MB of GDDR3 - $79
• ATI Radeon HD 4650 - 512 MB of GDDR2 - $69

Both cards feature 320 stream processing cores.

Note: A version of the HD 4670 with 1GB of memory is scheduled to be released later this month.

The press release accompanying the release emphasizes how little power these new cards draw:

Both the ATI Radeon HD 4670 and ATI Radeon HD 4650 deliver substantial gaming horsepower with minimal power draw – the ATI Radeon HD 4670 operating at under 60 watts and the ATI Radeon HD 4650 operating under 50 watts under full load – eliminating the need for additional power connectors and making installation a cinch.

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Built with efficiency, scalability and performance in mind, the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series sets a new performance-per-watt standard for mainstream graphics products, thanks to the enhanced bandwidth of DDR3, new power management capabilities that provide greater performance and efficiency, and 55nm technology. The series features AMD’s second generation ATI PowerPlay™ technology which allows for automatic power adjustments based on the activity of the graphics processing unit (GPU), resulting in significant power savings when the GPU is idle. Moreover, ATI PowerPlay enables advanced clock gating, as well as increased voltage and memory scaling, delivering performance on demand with exceptional efficiency.

These cards also pack a punch:

The result is that even in today’s most demanding games like Crysis, the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series delivers up to double the performance of competing products at the same price.

This claim is backed up by the following footnote:

The MSRP of the ATI Radeon HD 4670 is USD $79 and is the same price as the Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT based on www.newegg.com data available as of September 4, 2008. The ATI Radeon HD 4670 delivers up to double the performance of the Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT in games including Race Driver Grid (High Quality settings at both 1680x1050 and 1440x900), Half Life 2 (High Quality settings at 1680x1050 4xAA/16xAF), and Crysis (Medium Quality settings at 1680x1050 and 1440x900) as reported at http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33931118.

This is sure to shake up the GPU market.

• 320 Stream Processing Units- Enough power to tackle the most demanding HD games and applications.
• Microsoft DirectX® 10.1 - Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities.
• Enhanced Anti-Aliasing (AA) & Anisotropic Filtering (AF) - High performance anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing (4X AA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
• ATI CrossFireX™ Technology - Dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ technology offers superior scalability.
• PCI Express 2.0 - Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.
• Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) - UVD 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for the most processing-intensive content. Take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture capabilities.
• Upscale Beyond 1080p - Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p display resolution and beyond.
• Enhanced DVD Upscaling - Watch standard DVD movies in near high-definition quality with DVD upscaling. The GPU uses post processing algorithms to enhance standard and low resolution videos and movies on your HD display.
• Dynamic Contrast - Dynamic Contrast automatically adjusts the contrast and brightness during scenes to consistently deliver a crisp, vibrant picture.
• HDMI - Enjoy the latest audio technologies using HDMI with 7.1 digital surround sound support delivering 8-channel audio. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of colors when connected to a capable HDTV.
• Integrated DisplayPort technology with audio
• Consumes Less Than 75 Watts under full load - ATI Radeon™ HD 4600 Series graphics cards consume less than 75 watts under full load, eliminating the need for an external power connection and making them easy to install.
• Dynamic Power Management - ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series graphics cards feature ATI PowerPlay™ technology, delivering high performance when needed and conserving power when the demand on the graphics processor is low.
• More Performance Per Watt - ATI Radeon HD 4600 series deliver up to 3x the performance per watt of AMD’s previous generation GPUs.
• Energy Efficient Manufacturing Process - Second generation 55nm chip uses the industry’s most energy efficient manufacturing process.

GPU Spec

• 514 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
• GDDR3/DDR3/DDR2 memory interface (depending on model)
• 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
• Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture   - 320 stream processing units   - 128-bit floating point precision for all operations   - Command processor for reduced CPU overhead   - Shader instruction and constant caches   - Up to 128 texture fetches per clock cycle   - Up to 128 textures per pixel   - Fully associative multi-level texture cache design   - DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression   - High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)   - Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs   - Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer   - Early Z test and Fast Z Clear   - Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)   - Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)   - 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support   - Physics processing support
• 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
• Anti-aliasing features   - Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)   - Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for superior quality   - Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling   - Gamma correct   - Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)   - All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
• 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
• OpenGL 2.0 support
• ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform  - 2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2)   - Hardware MPEG-1 and DivX video decode acceleration   - ATI Avivo Video Post Processor  - Two independent display controllers   - Two integrated DVI display outputs   - Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs   - DisplayPort™ output support   - HDMI output support   - Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder   - Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time   - VGA mode support on all display outputs
• ATI PowerPlay™ Technology   - Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings   - Performance-on-Demand   - Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
• ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology  - Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs   - Integrated compositing engine   - High performance bridge interconnect