Intorduction

Ever since the setback ATI suffered with the release of HD 2000 series, ATI has been on a technological innovation roll. First they released the world’s first DX 10.1 compliant GPUs which were the HD 3800 series. This was also the world’s first GPU manufactured using TSMC’s (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) 55nm fabrication process. Meanwhile, the competing GPUs from Nvidia were still using the 65nm process. With the release of HD 4770 ATI is again at the forefront of innovation. This is the first GPU manufactured using TSMC’s 40nm fabrication process.

Let’s have a look at our subject today:

The 4770 won’t set any performance records, but it will set new standards in the price/performance arena. These days AMD/ATI and Nvidia make their migration to a new design process by first making a low-end or a mid-range GPU on it. This enables them to refine the process and iron out the kinks before employing the process on expensive high-risk, high-end GPUs.

AMD has been following the strategy of “Multiply and Conquer” since the release of the HD 3000 series. This means that they make small-sized, low-power GPUs instead of making a large monolithic GPU. AMD realizes that the sweet spot of GPU sales is not at the high end, but at the lower end. In order to compete at the high end, AMD/ATI uses two of these smaller chips to form a card like HD 3870-X2 and HD 4870-X2. This “Sweet Spot Strategy” allows them to make GPUs for both the low end and the high end.

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Specifications

HD 4770 is based on the RV 740 GPU. This is the first GPU in the world to be made using TSMC’s 40nm fabrication process. The GPU packs an impressive 826 million transistors. To put things into perspective, have a look at the images below:

All those 836 million transistors are packed in an area which is less than that of a a dime.

The RV 740 GPU features 640 SPUs (Stream Processor Units) along with 32 TAUs (Texture Address Units) and 16 ROPs (Rasterization Operator Units). It uses a 128-bit wide memory bus, connected to 512 MB GDDR5 memory which should result in the same bandwidth as a 256-bit bus/GDDR3 memory combination. AMD decided to use 128-bit wide memory bus here to keep the costs down as this card targets the $99 segment. As with all AMD/ATI cards, this card supports Microsoft DirectX 10.1 technology. The GPU clock runs at 750 MHz and the 512 MB GDDR5 memory is clocked at 800 MHz (3.2 GHz effective) yielding a bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s.

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The Card Exterior

The HD 4770 uses a double slot cooler with a high RPM fan.  The fan does a fine job of pushing the air through the array of fins to outside of the case, out through the back.

This is one of the most beautiful looking coolers I have seen. I can’t take my eyes off the voluptuous curves on the cooler.

The PCB is 8.5″ inches long. This is 1.5 inch shorter than its bigger brothers, HD 4890 and HD 4870.

The HD 4770 features 2 DVI Connectors (HDCP Capable). Both are dual-link DVI, thus supporting high-resolution monitors. This card also features 2 crossfire fingers, which allows it to be paired with other AMD/ATI cards in CrossfireX.

There are no memory chips at the back of the card. But with the arrival of 1 GB models on the market, that should change.

This card is rated at 80w TDP (Thermal Design Power). As the PCI-E slot can only deliver 75W of power, this card also uses a 6-pin power connector.

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Under the Hood

Let’s take the cooler off and see what’s hidden under there. To take off the cooler you need to take off 8 screws: 6 on the back of the PCB as shown in the image below, the other 2 from the I/O faceplate which hold the memory chip heatsink in place.

Taking the cooler off, we see that the memory chips are covered by a black heatsink. This card use 3-phase power circuitry with three power transistors in each phase.

In the pictures below, you see the heat fins that the air gets pushed through to the outside through the back of the case. The cooler uses 2 heatpipes. This should be enough, as this is a 40nm GPU and shouldn’t produce much heat. The original HD 4870 AMD reference cooler also used 2 heatpipes, but AMD decided to tweak that design to 3 heatpipes with the launch of HD 4890. As a result HD 4890 runs cooler than HD 4870.

After taking off the memory chips heatsink, we see that this card uses 8 GDDR5 memory chips of 64 MB each. The memory chips here are made by Qimonda, model number, IDGV51-05A1F1C-40X.  They are rated to run up to 1000 (4000) MHz frequency with 1.5V voltage. As they are only clocked at 800 (3200) MHz on a stock HD 4770, we know that they probably have good overclocking headroom.

Here is the RV 740 GPU again, in case you missed it on the previous page. The GPU marking (0911) tells you the production date: week 11 of 2009 – which is March 8-14, 2009.

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The Card: The Video

Sometimes the photographs just don’t do justice to the experience of actually seeing a card. I can’t give you the same experience I had while holding the card in my hand, but I can make it a bit closer than those images you just saw. Watch the video below and decide for yourself if watching a video is better than looking at still images and let us know what you think in our ABT forums.

HD Stream can be found here.

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Software and Test System Used:

Test Configuration

Hardware

• Intel Q9450 @ 3.2GHz
• GIGABYTE EX-38 DS4
• GeIL 4GB (2×2GB) 800MHz RAM 5-4-4-12
• Zerotherm Nirvana 120mm CPU Cooler
• Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music
• 2 x Western Digital 6400AAKS 640GB SATA Hard Drives
• 1 x Western Digital 250AAKS 250GB
• 1 x SAMSUNG 22X DVD±R SATA DVD Burner
• Cooler Master Silent Pro 600M PSU (Kindly Supplied by Cooler Master)
• Cooler Master Sniper Case

Software

• Windows Vista SP2 x64
• Nvidia GeForce 185.66 drivers
• ATI Catalyst 9.5 hotfix
• All settings in Nvidia and Catalyst control panel at default
• PhysX on GeForce GPU’s in Nvidia control panel was disabled
• All games were patched to their latest versions
• Game settings are shown on the benchmark results page
• 1280×1204 resolution was used for these tests as this was the maximum resolution available to me.

Video Cards Used

• Galaxy 9600 GT 512 MB  Low Power Low Profile (Review Here) – 600 MHz/1500 MHz/900 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Galaxy 9600 GT 512 MB  Low Power Low Profile (Review Here) Overclocked to 716 MHz/1850 MHz/1107 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Palit 9800 GT 1 GB – 600 MHz/1500 MHz/900 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Galaxy GTS 250 512 MB (Review Here) – 738 MHz/1836 MHz/1100 MHz  (Core/Shader/Memory)
• Galaxy GTS 250 512 MB (Review Here) Overclocked to 820 MHz/2040 MHz/1320 MHz (Core/Shader/Memory)
• AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4770 512 MB – 750 MHz/800 MHz (Core/Memory)
• AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4770 512 MB Overclocked to 875 MHz/975 MHz (Core/Memory)

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Overclocking

Whenever a new fabrication process comes to the market, one thought that travels through every enthusiast’s mind is about the overclocking potential of the card. Common consensus is that the smaller the fabrication process gets, the overclocking potential increases due to decreased heat output.

For finding the maximum overclock, we run the card through all of our gaming tests. The highest clocks at which it can pass all the tests is taken as the highest overclock. This card overclocked nicely. From the stock frequencies of 750 MHz/800 MHz (3200 MHz) GPU/Memory, I was able to overclock up to 875 MHz/ 975 MHz (3900 MHz effective) GPU/Memory. That’s an overclock of 16.7%/21.9% on GPU/Memory. It’s a pretty impressive overclock, which should help this card gain some extra frames per second in games.

Temperature and Power Consumption

To measure maximum temperature and power consumption, we turn to Furmark. Furmark represents one of the most intensive tests a GPU can run. Thus temperatures and power consumption measured with Furmark represent the worst-case scenario. Although no game today puts as much load on the GPU as Furmark does, should a game do that in future, you will be ready armed with the knowledge gained by testing with Furmark – knowing how hot your card can get and how much power it can consume.

According to its developer, “FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why FurMark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card. This benchmark requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600 (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series with the latest graphics drivers.”

To save power, this card downclocks to 250 MHz on the GPU Core. The ambient temperature was maintained at 21-22 C.

Here are the settings used for temperature measurement and the result on the right:

	Temperature (C)
Idle	47
Load	66

http://alienbabeltech.com/main/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/vantage-test-settings.jpg	Power Consumption – System (Watts)
Idle	142
Load	204

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Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark’s 3DMark series of benchmarks are the darling benchmarks of the enthusiast crowd. Although they don’t provide real world gameplay indication, they are still a good indicator of system performance and can help determine if something is wrong.

3DMark06 is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX9 performance of your graphics card. 3DMark06 is the most downloaded benchmark and the ORB database of 3DMark 06 results, maintained by Futuremark, now contains over 8.5 million 3DMark06 benchmark scores from around the world. Three main graphic tests from 3DMark05 were carried over to 3DMark06 and updated. The tests included in 3DMark 06 feature HDR rendering, shadow mapping, water surfaces created using pixel shaders with HDR refraction, HDR reflection, depth fog and Gerstner wave functions, heterogeneous fog, light scattering and cloud blending, etc.

3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.

Note: PhysX on GeForce cards was disabled in Nvidia Control Panel.

With a crippled 128-bit bus, you might not expect HD 4770 to be much of a card when compared to cards with 256-bit memory bus. But the GDDR5 balances out things in the end. Here we see HD4770 almost beat the GTS 250 in 3DMark 06 and picking up the top spot in 3DMark Vantage.

Race Driver: GRID is the latest addition to the TOCA Touring Car series by Codemasters. GRID is a hybrid between arcade and simulator of mainly road racing that consists of 43 cars featuring very fast racing, awesome graphics, along with a great damage model that leads to some of the most fantastic crashes we have seen in a game. There are several types of competitions for different cars: GT races, open wheel races, demolition derbies, etc.  There are also several tracks from different countries, including Japan, United States and European tracks, such as Le Mans and Spa Francorchamps.  A track racing through the streets of Milan is also available.

Here are the settings we used:

HD 4770 does well here by beating the 9800 GT and matching the GTS 250 once overclocked. But the overclocked GTS 250 takes the cake.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (”High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron”) is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft.  Players have the opportunity to take the throttle of over 50 famous aircraft and fly them over real world locations and cities in photo-realistic environments created with satellite data. This game is a more of an arcade take on flying, with the aircraft able to do drifts in mid air like a car does on the road. The controls are easy with the aircraft handling more like a car but it is an immensely fun game.

Settings Used:

HAWX is able to take advantage of DX10.1 features on AMD cards. And we see that it makes almost a 10 FPS difference in average FPS.  We see the HD 4770 match GTS 250 without using DX10.1 here. Once we switch to DX10.1, GTS 250 is left in the dust.

Call of Juarez is one of the earliest DirectX10 games from the Polish developer Techland. It is a First Person Shooter set in the Wild West, loosely based on a number of Western movie hits which were popular in the sixties and early seventies. Call of Juarez uses the Chrome Engine which utilizes modern game programming technologies and techniques such as  High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering, Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapping, relief mapping, self-shadowing using ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering simulating diffusion and diffraction of rays finding their way through translucent objects; realistic water surfaces based on dynamic liquid system, real time HDR reflections and refraction, fading underwater visibility based on distance.

We used the benchmark tool that is added to the game with the patch 1.1.1.0. Here are the settings used:

Call of Juarez has always been favorable to  AMD/ATI cards. HD 4770 is no exception here. It beats GTS 250 be about 7 FPS at stock frequencies, and an impressive 11 FPS when overclocked.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is the second game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It is a stand-alone prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. The game consists of a roughly 50/50 mix of new areas and old, remodeled areas from the previous game. The X-ray graphics engine, originally used inS.T.A.L.K.E.R Shadow of Chernobyl, has been updated to version 1.5 and includes DirectX 10 support. With patch 1.5.06 the game now supports DirectX 10.1 available on ATI video cards. Additionally, the AI received an overhaul to accommodate the new faction wars feature. Advancements made in version 1.5 include volumetric light (a.k.a. ‘God-rays’), volumetric smoke, volumetric fire, soft water, dynamic wet surfaces (with water streaming down the sides of surfaces), depth-of-field blur, DirectX 10 support, SSAO (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) and more.

I used the 12 minute, stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators.

Here are the settings used:

HD 4770 sits between the 9800 GT and the GTS 250 in this benchmark.

Company of Heroes is a real-time strategy game (RTS) developed by Relic Entertainment. Company of Heroes is set during World War II where the player commands two U.S. military units during the Battle of Normandy and the Allied capture of France. It makes use of the “Essence Engine”, developed in-house by Relic. This engine makes use of special graphical effects, including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping.Company of Heroes also utilizes the Havok physics engine.

The in-game performance benchmark was used for this test and the results are taken from what is reported by this benchmark at its conclusion. All the latest patches were applied. Here is the settings screen:

GTS 250 and HD 4770 are pretty much even in this game.

World in Conflict is a real-time strategy video game developed by the Swedish video game company Massive Entertainment. The story follows an alternate reality Earth where the Cold War did not end and Russia won in 1989. The game is set after Russia invaded the USA and the remaining Americans decide to strike back. World in Conflict uses the MassTech Engine which  includes DX9 and DX10 renders, particle systems, vegetation and water rendering and also physics and animation. It is a fast engine, which allows tons of units to be rendered with high realism. The engine was custom made for the game. It handles the rendering of many of the individual elements of the game to make it as realistic as possible like buildings, green stuff, and clouds.

Everything was maxed out. Here are the settings screens:

HD 4770 really struggles in this game. It comes behind the 9800 GT on average FPS but has higher minimum FPS. It is not able to match the GTS 250 even when it is overclocked.

Lost Planet Extreme Condition: Colonies Edition is a gold edition version of Lost Planet:Extreme Condition developed and published by Capcom for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC. It has the honor of being the first DirectX10 game. The Colonies Edition includes new multiplayer maps, a Human vs Akrid multiplayer mode, and a selection of new multiplayer characters and weapons. The benchmark areas are also different from the non-colonies edition.

The game uses the MT Framework Engine. MT stands for “Multi-Thread”, “Meta Tools” and “Multi-Target”.

1280×960 was the max resolution available. I used the Area 1 for the benchmark purposes. All other settings were maxed out. Here are the screens

This benchmark is the complete opposite of what we saw in the World in Conflict benchmark. HD 4770 completely turns the tables on the GTS 250 here, coming out faster by 2 FPS at stock and nearly 5 FPS when overclocked.

Far Cry 2 is an free roaming first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Although it uses the name of the original of the original Far Cry game, the similarities end right there. Far Cry 2 is a completely different story set in a completely different environment.

Far Cry 2 uses the Dunia game engine developed by Ubisoft’s Montreal development team for Far Cry 2.  Dunia means “world”, “earth” or “living” in Arabic but also used in many languages with Arabic loanwords including Punjabi, Persian, Nepali, Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Kurdish, Turkish, Malay, Marathi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marvadi and Swahili.  To portray the African setting in the game as realistically as possible the development team went to Africa to study how things work there. The engine features Dynamic Weather, Dynamic fire propagation (influenced by weather system), Realistic Fire, Physics, Full day/night cycles. Realistic Fire is a high point of this game. It is the best looking depiction of a fire in a video game to date. The engine takes advantage of DirectX9 and DirectX 10 technologies.

I used the benchmark tool that comes with the game. Here are the settings screens:

HD 4770 loses out to 9800 GT in this game, but nearly matches the GTS 250 when overclocked.

Crysis series is one of the most beautiful set of games to grace our PC screens to date and they can bring the highest end PCs to their knees.

Crysis Warhead, developed by Crytek, is an expansion to the original Crysis. Crysis Warhead follows Sergeant Michael “Psycho” Sykes, a formerly Non-Playable Character (NPC) from the original Crysis, as he faces his own trials and challenges on the other side of the island which is during the time period of the first game.

HardwareOC Bench tool was used for benchmarking purposes.   The demo was run 3 times, with the first result discarded.  Here are the settings used:

HD 4770 ends up about 1 FPS slower than GTS 250 at stock.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare was one of the most successful games of 2007.  It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, selling over seven million copies by January 2008. It uses a proprietary game engine that includes features such as true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field. It features a fictional story set in the near-future. The most well-received part of the game is its multiplayer modes, where you earn experience points for kills and completing certain tasks online. These experience points unlock certain abilities and new and more powerful guns which can tip the balance in your favor in online matches.

For testing this game, I recorded a timedemo on the “Creek” map while playing online. The demo was played back at normal speed with the demo command from the console and the results were recorded by FRAPS.

Here are the settings used:

Call of Duty 4 is not taxing on these video cards. All of them are able to provide smooth gameplay here. HD 4770 beats out the 9800 GT handily by 11 FPS on average.

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Video Playback

Free software such as Media Player Classic Home Cinema can use GPU acceleration. As this card could be used for a HTPC-gaming rig, we decided to check out its FullHD video playback capabilities.

I used Media Player Classic Home Cinema for the playback. The video used was the trailer of movie “The International” available from Divx 7 HD showcase Webpage. This is a 12.3 Mbps 1920×816 video. Here’s the image with video info

This screens show the CPU Usage when played in Windows Media Player using ffdshow decoders.

This screen shows the same CPU Usage in Rivatuner’s Hardware Monitor

Here is a video of CPU Playback, notice the CPU usage in the task manager

Now lets see the CPU usage when the GPU does the decoding. Same video, played in Media Player Classic Home Cinema using GPU decoding.

And this is the CPU usage in Rivatuner’s Hardware monitor.

Here is a video of CPU Playback while decoding is done on the GPU, notice the CPU usage in the task manager

The difference is amazing, isn’t it?  This feature can allow you to spend less money on a CPU while making a HTPC, because now you know that your GPU would be able to do most of the decoding while keeping the CPU free.

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Conclusion

HD 4770 serves as a stepping stone for AMD/ATI to test their R7xx architecture on a brand new 40nm fabrication process. And HD 4770 does not disappoint. It does what it started out to do, which is to shake up the $99 segment. It offers great value at this price. It catches up to the more expensive GTS 250 in most of the games, while beating it heavily in Call of Juarez. It manages to beat the 9800 GT in most of the games with the exception of World in Conflict.

Pros

• Great price/performance ratio
• Runs cool
• Uses less power
• Good overclockability
• Dual slot cooler exhausts air outside of the case

Cons

• Not readily available for purchase due to its lack of supply

Although the HD 4770 is out of stock at most of the e-tailers in US, the situation is likely to improve in the coming months. And when it does become available, you shouldn’t think twice about picking up this card. It offers a tremendous performance for its price. The level of performance a $100 card offers these days is amazing.

We are happy to award the AMD/ATI Radeon HD 4770 our “Great Value” award.

«1. Introduction2. Specifications3. Eye Candy:The Card Exterior4. Eye Candy: Under the Hood5. The Card: The VIDEO6. Software and Test System Used7. Overclocking, Temperature and Power Consumption8. 3DMark 06 and Vantage9. GRID10. HAWX11. Call of Juarez12. STALKER Clear Sky13. Company of Heroes14. World In Conflict15. Lost Planet Colonies Edition16. Far Cry 217. Crysis Warhead18. Call of Duty 419. Video Playback20. Conclusion21. View All»