The HD 4770

ATI have released to market (in the US, at least) an exciting innovation - the HD4770 which for all intents and purposes is a "lower end" video card, but the first to use a 40 nanometer production process, allowing for lower power usage, smaller chips, and most importantly, less heat production.

The HD 4770 features 512MB of GDDR5 memory, and is considered to be a direct competitor the 9800GT. The most exciting thing about the HD 4770 though, is its price point. In the United States, the card retails for a measly US$100, and for the cost, packs an impressive array of features and hardware into a dual slot solution that only uses 80 watts of power at full load.

The card features some 826 million transistors, 512MB of GDDR5 memory at 3.2GHz, a 750MHz core clock, and a 750MHz Stream Processor Clock. All this means that the card has a memory band width of 51.2GB/s, a mere 14 GB/s away from it's slightly faster (and older, more power hungry) brother, the HD 4850.

At modest resolutions, (1680x1050), the HD 4770 is able to achieve just over twenty frames per second in a game such as Crysis, while managing to produce just-below one hundred frames per second in Unreal Tournament 3. While the card may not be directly aimed at "hard core gamers", the card fulfils a cheap and powerful role as a Media PC / "light gaming" card for those running at lower resolutions.

The best innovation that the card brings to market, however, is the 40 nanometer production process, which means that future ATI cards using this process will be faster, cheaper to produce, and cooler than current generation cards. In addition, the die-shrink of the GPU means that the cards will use less power. The card is also capable of decoding Blu-Ray video, like all cards in its price range.

While the HD 4770 may not be a major leap forward in terms of raw performance, the move to a 40 nanometer production process means that the next generation of video cards from ATI are going to be very interesting indeed.

With 40 nanometer production, we can expect cooler, quieter, faster, and most importantly, cheaper graphics cards in the future.