Expreview has published the first full review of the 4770 (RV740). As you may know, the 4770 is ATi\u2019s first 40nm desktop card that is supposed to replace the 4830 at a $99 price-point, and is due for official release in the next few days.<\/p>\n
Interestingly it appears the card only uses a 128 bit memory path, but makes up for the loss of width by using GDDR5 to attain higher transfer rates over standard GDDR3. Overall the bandwidth ends up being slightly less than the 4830, yet the 4770 is still faster than both the 640 SP and 800 SP 4830 variants overall, proving memory bandwidth isn\u2019t the primary limiting factor with these particular cards.<\/p>\n
Overall the 4770 is 5.66% slower than the 4850, but this is still okay given its $99 price-point is lower than the 4850\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Compared to the 9800 GT which has the same $99 price-point, the 4770 is almost 20% faster overall, which is a good victory. In particular it\u2019s more than 50% faster in Quake Wars 1920×1200 with 8xAA, again highlighting nVidia\u2019s poor performance with 8xMSAA in OpenGL (something I myself have observed in the past).<\/p>\n
At only\u00a0$99, that kind of performance should sell like hot-cakes for ATi, and the 40nm process should make it quite cheap to manufacture.<\/p>\n
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