Introduction

The top end graphics cards from both nVidia and ATI are becoming more and more expensive and with the current economic crisis, the two don’t exactly go hand-in-hand. As a result, ATI have come up with the 4770 with a price point of around £80 which should appeal to a much wider range of users. The card is also ATI’s first to be manufactured using a 40 nanometre manufacturing process and contains 826 million transistors, 640 shader processing cores and 512MB of GDDR5 memory on the R740 core.

"How well exactly will the 4770 be able to compete" I hear you asking? Well, I have here a Sapphire HD 4770 card so let’s see how it shapes up and whether it can cause a drop in prices in competing cards.  

Features

• GDDR5 memory
  
• DirectX® 10.1
  
• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
  
• Dual mode ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
  
• PCI Express® 2.0 support
  
• Dynamic geometry acceleration
  
• Game physics processing capability
  
• ATI Avivo™HD video and display technology
  
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology
  
• ATI Stream technology

Specifications

• I/O Output: Dual DL-DVI-I+HDTV
• Core Clock: 750 MHz
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
• Memory Clock: 800 MHz, 3.2Gbps
• 512MB /128bit GDDR5 memory interface
• Dual Slot Active Cooler
• HDMI compliant via dongle
• 7.1 Audio Channel Support
• Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
• Shader Model 4.1 support

Redefine HD Gaming

• Advanced Memory
  GDDR5 provides twice the data per pin of GDDR3 memory at the same clock speeds.
• Enhanced Anti-Aliasing (AA) & Anisotropic Filtering (AF)
  High performance anisotropic filtering and 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) smooth jagged edges and create true-to-life graphics, for everything from grass to facial features.
• Microsoft DirectX 10.1
  Play today while preparing for tomorrow with state-of-the-art DirectX 10.1 graphics capabilities.
• ATI CrossFireX™ Technology
  ATI CrossFireX™ technology with up to quad GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are.
• PCI Express 2.0
  Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.
• Power to Spare
  This GPU has the brute processing power needed for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations.

Go Beyond HD Video

• Unified Video Decoder 2(UVD 2)
  Unified Video Decoder 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for even the most processing-intensive content, including VC-1, H.264 and now MPEG-2. Also, take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities.
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
  With ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 GPUs can help accelerate the conversion of standard
  and HD video into multiple formats for use on differing consumer electronics devices. The ATI Video Converter,
  designed to enable GPU transcoding of HD video streams, is currently available.
• 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 supports. Also, xvYCC support allows the user to enjoy a wider range of colour when connected to a capable HDTV.
  

Break-through Efficiency

• Dynamic Power Management
  ATI Radeon HD 4770 GPU delivers high performance when needed and conserves power when the demand
  on the graphics processor is low.