Author: Ben Sun · 09-30-2008
ATI has been releasing new video cards on a fast pace recently with the release of the HD 4870, 4850, 4870 X2, 4670, 4650, and now the 4550 each targeting different video card segments from the high-end to the mainstream value segments. The 4870 and 4850 are the king of the hill of their respective price segments with the 4870 x2 being the top of the hill in terms of pure performance. But not every end-user wants to spend $500+ on a video card. 2/3s of the retail video card purchases are made in the under $100 level. The HD 4670 and 4650 cards target the upper level of that but what about the $50 level? That’s where today’s launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4550 comes in. EVGA, an NVIDIA partner has dropped their 9500GT card to match the price of the ATI HD 4550 and it should be an interesting performance comparison between the two cards at this price point in terms of target markets, gaming and features.
The ATI Radeon HD 4550 is based upon ATI’s RV710 chip. It is manufactured at TSMC, ATI’s and NVIDIA’s chip foundry partner on their 55 nanometer process. ATI has now moved to the 55 nanometer process for their entire lineup top to bottom and their experience shows as they have designed chips to draw less power and have high performance for a lower price point.
One of the big selling points of the HD 4550 is as a Home Theater PC card. The reference card has a Display Port, a DVI port, and a VGA port. The card has a port for HDMI audio, meaning that you can get 7.1 sound out of the HDMI port. The HDMI and Display Ports allow the user to have the ultimate in choice as to the type of monitor to use with the card, whether a big screen HDTV or a LCD monitor for gaming.
The Radeon HD 4550 has 80 Stream Processors. By way of comparison the previous generation HD 3450 has 40 SPs, so this should make the HD 4550 performance much higher than the older chip. The RV710 has a 128-bit memory interface which along with the 1.6GHz effective memory clock speed offers a memory bandwidth of 12.8GB/second.
ATI’s version of the Stream Processor is different than NVIDIA’s in significant ways. The RV710 has two SIMD cores and each of the cores has eight stream processors. Each of the Stream Processors is capable of a 5D operation, meaning that there’s a total of 80 Stream Processors on the HD 4550. The 80 SPs allow the HD 4550 to have 48 GigaFLOPs of computing power.
ATI has had a GPGPU client in the works for a while now. As NVIDIA is pushing the PhysX hardware physics software ATI partnered with Intel to promote the Havok Physics software. Note that ATI could probably support PhysX on their hardware but it’s a matter of licensing and NVIDIA allowing it to happen. ATI supports open standards for software and therefore supports Havok. We’ll have to wait and see if they’ll enable PhysX support.
ATI decided to move to a new architecture with the HD 38xx series, being the first video card company to support Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1 in hardware. Key features of DirectX 10.1 include Indexed cube map arrays, independent blend modes per render target, Pixel coverage sample masking, read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders, and Gather4 texture fetches.
The Radeon HD 4550 has the ability to do a maximum of 4x MSAA. The other members of the HD 4xxx family can do 8x MSAA but the performance of the Radeon HD 4550 and the number of render backends on the card means that the card cannot do 8X MSAA unless two cards are in CrossfireX mode. In any event, 8x MSAA would be totally unplayable on all but the most basic games and shouldn’t be a factor on deciding whether to buy this card.
ATI is really pushing High Definition playback with this card and with all HD 4xxx series cards. THE HD 4550 has ATI’s Unified Video Decoder 2 which has full hardware acceleration for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2. The UVD2 also supports Picture-in-picture allowing you to watch a Blu-Ray movie for example and simultaneously watch the cast commentary. The HD 4550 has two independent display controllers, allowing for dual monitor use.
ATI’s multiple GPU solution is called CrossfireX. The HD 4550 is capable of improving gaming performance with more than one graphics card. Of course this means that the HD 4550 would need a second HD 4550 to come close to the performance of the next level of card, the HD 4650 as the HD 4650 has double or more SPs and has the performance to back it up. There is no Crossfire bridge on this card so the reference card can’t do Crossfire but partner cards can.
source : www.motherboards.org
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