Author: Ben Sun · 10-10-2008
The battle for the video card dollar has never been closer between NVIDIA and ATI. Every card in ATI’s lineup has a similarly performing and priced card in NVIDIA’s lineup. NVIDIA, in fact, has redrawn their price/performance ratio in response to ATI’s launches of the HD 4870 X2, 4870, 4670, 4550 and the recent launch of the ATI HD 4350. One problem with the multiple launches and multiple price drops is the dilution of the video card market where many cards are competing against other cards that were never meant to compete with. This is great for the consumer, with the financial crisis impacting everyone including banks and mortgage companies but bad for the companies who designed their marketing around certain profit margins.
The vast majority of video card purchases are made at the under $100 range in price. This market is marked by competition not only from the two graphics card company’s offerings but also from the integrated graphics available on the market from Intel and AMD solutions as the integrated graphics come with the motherboard and when looking at price/performance one has to ask is it worth spending the sub $30 on a discrete video card or is it better to have integrated graphics as part of the cost of a new system and buy a more expensive discrete card later. On the Intel side of things, a discrete graphics card makes sense as the Intel integrated graphics available to most everyone is a joke. On the AMD side of things where the HD 3300 and NVIDIA GeForce 8300 are solutions the choice is harder.
ATI launched the Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 cards a few short months ago. The 4870 card and the GeForce GTX260 cards have been battling for the under $300 price range, while the 4850 battles with the GeForce 9800GTX for the under $200 price range. ATI has recently announced the HD 4670 and 4550 cards for the under $100 price point. That theoretically leaves a $40 price point open for cards and ATI has recently launched the HD 4350 to fit that price point. NVIDIA has countered by reducing their 9400GT cards to that price point meaning that it should be an interesting battle of sub $40 cards. ATI and EVGA have sent respective cards on the HD 4350 and the 9400GT for review and that is the battle royal today.
In many respects the Radeon HD 4350 is the smaller brother of the HD 4550 that I reviewed less than a month ago. The HD 4350 has 80 Stream Processors, 8 Texture units and 4 ROPS which is the same number as found on the HD 4550 cards. It is built upon TSMC’s 55 nanometer press with 242 million transistors ATI built the HD 4XXX series stressing performance per watt and the HD 4350 design is.
The HD4350 has a 64-bit memory bus. The memory bus on the video card combined with the memory clock speed determines how much memory bandwidth a card has. The HD 4350 has a memory clock speed of 1 GHz effective, meaning that the card has 8GB of memory bandwidth available to it. The card uses DDR2 memory which is very inexpensive memory right now but the card is inexpensive so it’s a good fit.
ATI’s big push on video cards is on DirectX 10.1 features. The DirectX 10.1 feature set is going to be more featured in the near future with big game companies like EA and Sega announcing support for it and DirectX 11 video cards needing to support DirectX 10.1 to be compliant. NVIDIA argues, with some justification that DirectX 10.1 is a minor feature update to DirectX 10.0. In any event cards like the HD 4350 do not have the performance to take full advantage of DirectX 10.1 and it shouldn’t be a major factor either way.
ATI’s Universal Video Decoder is their decode software for HD content like Blu-Ray disks and H.264 video playback software. The HD 4350 is capable of full speed Blu-Ray playback but ATI states that it might not have the horsepower to do picture in a picture dual stream playback that the other HD 4xxx series can do. The HD 4350 reference card is designed to offer HDMI Audio (7.1) through the included HDMI port making it ideal for the Home Theater PC enthusiast
source : www.motherboards.org
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