AMD looks to become the first graphics cards manufactor on the market with a 40nm GPU, a GPU codenamed RV740. The first finished card using the chip will be dubbed ATI Radeon HD 4770 and AMD’s sights are set at a sub-$100 price point, aka the volume market. Radeon HD 4770 will be competing against first and foremost NVIDIA’s 9800GT, or whatever that might be called by next week, but shouldn’t have any real trouble giving the NVIDIA competitor some major stick despite being way cheaper.
Asian hardware site PCPOP.com has published a few slides showing off not only pictures of the card itself, but also detailed specifications as well as some performance tests. The tests may be done by AMD itself, but should give you at least a hint of what to expect by the first 40nm chip.
According to these tests (and those weird scales), the HD 4770 will outperform the GeForce 9800GT by up to 50% in certain tasks, notably scaling better with higher resolutions than its green counterpart.
The performance aside, the specifications seem to be up to par with the latest rumors with a GPU frequency of 750MHz and 640 shaders (much like the HD 4830 it’ll be replacing), as well as a memory bandwidth of 51.2GB/s thanks to its quad-channel GDDR5 memory.
By the looks of it, the HD 4770 will show up in stores later on this month, with HD 4830 being brushed aside, not to mention the fact that NVIDIA will probably have to be doing a thing or two with their price lists to keep up with what looks to be the new price/performance king.
