AMD announced today the new Radeon HD 4770 energy efficient graphics cards that are taking advantage of a 40nm GPU technology and will retail for about $100. "Consumer pressure in this economic downturn is shifting demand to lower prices and the price band around $100 has the highest demand and highest volume," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. "AMD has responded with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4770, targeting this market with cutting-edge technologies like 40 nm processors, support for DirectX 10.1 gaming and GDDR5 memory. This strategy stands in stark contrast to the old 'trickle down' technology approach some still use to address this important segment."

The new card features third-generation hardware support for the latest DirectX 10.1 games. It is based on RV740 GPU and compared to the company's Radeon HD 4850 solution; it has 20% less stream processors (640) and 32 texture units (40 for the HD 4850). On the other hand, the new HD 4770 is equipped with GDDR5 memory clocked at 800 MHz, compared to the 1000MHz GDDR3 that we have seen with the HD 4850 model. The new GDDR5 memory offers an increased data rate of 3.2Gbps.



The HD 4770 is also faster in terms of engine clock (GPU), which is now 750 MHz.

In addition, the new 40nm GPU is more energy efficient compared to the 55nm chip of the HD 4850, resulting to a maximum board power of 80W (110 W for the HD 4850).

Besides these changes, the HD 4770 shares the same characteristics with the HD 4850, offering an overall compute power of 960 GFLOPs.



AMD said that the card could be implemented in dual and single slot boards, depending on the graphics card manufacturer. The video card uses a 6-pin power cable and offers dual DVI and TV-out ports.



According to AMD, the new HD 4770 solution is almost 30% faster than its Nvidia competitor, the GeForce 9800GT.