AMD still hasn’t made any official announcement regarding its coming RV740 circuit, which is the company’s first attempt at 40nm. Already an extensive preview of AMD’s first RV740-based card has appeared. The name of the card is somewhat unclear but Guru3D calls it Radeon HD 4750 and it is expected to cost less than $100 when it actually arrives. The card is very similar to the current ATI Radeon HD 4830, which is the entry model of AMD’s high-end series. The big difference is the clock frequencies of both GPU and memory along with the memory bus width.
Radeon HD 4750 has a 128-bit memory bus, which is half of what the Radeon HD 4800 series sports. But then 4750 has an ace up its sleeve, namely GDDR5 memory. Both Radeon HD 4830 and 4850 use GDDR3 memory at considerably lower frequencies, which in the end means that the actual bandwidth is the same.
Performance is actually better with Radeon HD 4750 than HD 4830 and in several benchmarks it even surpasses Radeon HD 4850. Not bad for a card that is expected to cost less than $100.
It has to be said though, that this is just an engineering sample and the drivers are not official, which means that the final performance and exact specifications could change before launch, but the price/performance is still very promising, close to mind-blowing. We look forward to more tests of AMD’s new 40nm card, especially as the drivers mature a bit.
