Japanese website PC Pop managed to acquire a batch of slides pertaining to the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4770, complete with the first 40nm desktop chip.
You have to admit: there's something sweet about leaked images, whether they're stills from an upcoming movie or the hardware specs of an upcoming graphics card. In this case, PC Pop scored the latter, acquiring six slides showcasing the upcoming ATI Radeon HD 4770.
According to the provided specs, the Radeon HD 4770 (RV470) will run faster than Nvidia's 9800GT, and one slide even announces its $99 price point, lower than the 9800GT's current price tag ranging from $119 to $139. A head-to-head slide reveals that the Radeon HD 4770 features 40nm processing; the 9800GT uses 65nm and 55nm processing. Additionally, the Radeon HD 4770 provides GDDR5 memory, 960 GLOPs of processing power, 12.0 GFLOPS per watt, and 9.7 GFLOPS per dollar. Nvidia's 9800GT isn't quiet as spectacular, using GDDR3 memory and offering 504 GFLOPs of processing power; users also get 4.8 GFLOPs per watt and 5.1 GFLOPs per dollar. To rub Nvidia's face even more into the dirt, AMD's new card supports DirectX 10.1; the 9800GT supports DirectX 10.
Is there a big difference between DirectX 10 and 10.1? A chart provided by AMD shows an improvement, using the PC game STALKER: Clear Sky as a benchmark. Set at 1920x1200 during the day, the game's DirectX 10.1 patch cranks up the frames per second to almost 40. That's not exactly fluid, however it's slightly better than 36 frames per second supplied by DirectX 10. By turning on the sunshafts, DirectX 10.1 still performs better than DirectX 10 without shafts, cranking out around 38 frames per second; DirectX 10 is only capable of 35 frames per second with sunshafts activated.
Outside the DirectX performance, the ATI Radeon HD 4770 features 826 million transistors; the 4670 uses 514 million and the 4850 uses 956 million. Clocking at 750 MHz, the 4770 also features 640 stream processors, a memory clock of 800 MHz using a 128-bit memory bus, a frame buffer size of 512 MB, and consumes 80 watts of power. While the card clocks at the same speed and uses the same memory bus as the 4670, it offers better performance using GDDR5, however it's still not quite as speedy as the 4850. With a compute performance of 1.0 TFLOPs, the 4850 coughs up a core clock of 625 MHz, but provides 800 stream processors, GDDR3 memory using a 256-bit bus, and a memory clock of 1000 MHz to make up the difference.
Sitting between the 4670 and 4850, the upcoming Radeon HD 4770 doesn't look too shabby, and with a $99 price tag, the card should be quite the hot item when it hits retail shelves soon. To check out all eight slides, click on the 4770 pictured above.
